Payal Bal
Assistant Director, Environmental Data And Analytics Branch
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolPayal Bal is an environmental data scientist and conservation decision analyst with eight years of applied research and leadership experience, currently serving as Assistant Director in the Environmental Data and Analytics Branch at the Australian federal environment department. She holds a PhD in Natural Resources Conservation and Research and a strong foundation in ecological modelling, having developed and coded quantitative models in R and MATLAB to inform multi-threat, multi-species management decisions. Her work spans coupling economic, land-use and biodiversity models for spatial prioritisation, mapping continental-scale impacts (notably fire susceptibility) for invertebrates, and leading data integration pipelines for national assessments. Payal combines rigorous sensitivity and value-of-information analyses with practical skills in field data collection, systematic reviews and visualization to deliver decision-relevant science. She also brings proven leadership and mentoring from early-career programs and committee roles, and a track record of translating interdisciplinary theory (economics, applied math, decision science) into operational tools for conservation policy. Based in Melbourne, she is in the process of converting her PhD outputs into published papers while driving national-scale biodiversity analytics.
8 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Masters, Ecological modelling, Masters, Ecological modelling at Uniersity of St Andrews, St AndrewsMSc, Ecology and Environmental Science, MSc, Ecology and Environmental Science at Pondicherry UniversityPrimary and Secondary Schools, Primary and Secondary Schools at Sacred Heart Convent School, ChandigarhUniversity of DelhiDoctor of Philosophy (PhD), Natural Resources Conservation and Research, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Natural Resources Conservation and Research at The University of Queensland
English, Hindi, Punjabi
Github Skills (5)
biodiversity7
poisson5
discovery5
python4
scheme3
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
payalbal/ppm_example
Dec 2019 - Sep 2021
Contributions:7 commits, 5 pushes, 1 branch in 1 year 8 months
payalbal/ausinvertraits.addons
Mar 2022 - Feb 2025
Extra bits for the ausinvertraits.build repository
Contributions:4 PRs, 29 pushes, 6 branches in 2 years 11 months
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