Sonya Sachdeva

Sonya Sachdeva is Chief Research Officer at GoodPower, where she leads research on how people understand, make decisions about, and act on clean energy and climate issues. A cognitive psychologist by training, her career has centered on a question that cuts across much of her work: How can we better understand the social, cultural, and psychological forces that shape whether people act to protect the natural world for generations to come?

That question has taken her across academia, government, and technology. At the U.S. Forest Service, she studied environmental values, public engagement, and decision-making, while also developing new approaches using data science and natural language processing. More recently, as Director of Wildfire Science at Overstory, she combined machine learning, satellite imagery, and geospatial modeling to help utilities better understand and mitigate wildfire risk.

Sonya is also Editor-in-Chief of Environment and Behavior and contributed to the global IPBES Values Assessment, including its 2023 Nature synthesis on the diverse ways people value nature. She holds a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Northwestern University.

She lives in Chicago with her husband, two kids, and dog, and outside of work can usually be found in the woods, watching a good MUBI movie, or playing trivia or ping-pong.