Prashant Hedao is an Architect, Landscape Architect, and Geographer, with about three decades of experience using GIS in various fields such as urban and regional planning, natural resources management, biodiversity conservation, post-disaster rehabilitation planning, and health emergencies. In the past, he has worked at ESRI Inc., World Wildlife Fund–US, the Environmental Agency of Abu Dhabi, and the University of California at Berkeley. In India, he was the regional planning coordinator at Auroville international township. During that period, he was also involved in post-disaster rehabilitation planning after the 2004 Asian tsunami in south India and the 2008 floods in northern India. Most recently, he was GIS & Information Management consultant with World Health Organization (WHO) Ethiopia, a consultant to GIZ for human-wildlife conflict in India, and assessing infrastructure vulnerability at The World Bank.
Currently, he is a GIS consultant at the GIS Centre for Health at WHO headquarters, where he is involved in the Horn of Africa Drought and Health Crisis emergency. He is also a visiting affiliate/scientist at the University of California at Davis in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Geography Graduate Group.
He has a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California at Davis (2016), a Master’s in Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania (1991), and a Bachelor’s in Architecture from Sir JJ College of Architecture, University of Mumbai (1984). He divides his time between south India and California and wherever his work takes him.