Maysaa Sati is a research associate at MIT's Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU), where she works on data-driven urban research at the intersection of AI, spatial analytics, and planning. Her work focuses on building urban data pipelines that integrate social media, remote sensing, and qualitative datasets to better understand cultural landscapes, urban change, and community dynamics.
Maysaa holds a Master of City Planning from MIT, where her research examined displacement camps as emergent urban systems shaped by collective labor, informal governance, and cultural identity. Her broader research interests center on how data, AI, and community-generated knowledge can support more equitable urban futures.
Her work draws on technical approaches including geospatial analysis, satellite and remote sensing interpretation, natural language processing, and machine learning-supported qualitative analysis. She specializes in structuring complex datasets and designing AI-assisted research workflows that translate social and spatial signals into planning-relevant insights.
At the LCAU, she contributes to interdisciplinary research initiatives that combine computational methods with place-based knowledge to support more responsive, culturally grounded, and future-oriented urban planning and design.
