Joy Ndamukunda is a SOURCES intern at the Statewide California Earthquake Center at USC. She works with Verisk Analytics to develop spatial models to assess how effectively Ts captures earthquake amplification effects. She specializes in managing and modeling spatial data to support research and decision-making in urban planning, environmental analysis, and geospatial intelligence.

Majoring in Global Geodesign at USC, Joy has worked as an undergraduate researcher with the USC Lusk Center’s Neighborhood Data for Social Change project. In that role, she created maps using ArcGIS Pro, built interactive dashboards in Tableau, and integrated spatial and non-spatial datasets for trend analysis. She applied spatial statistical tools such as Moran’s I, DBSCAN, and Getis-Ord Gi* to identify and interpret geographic patterns.

In a separate research initiative focused on opium cultivation in Afghanistan, Joy investigated the relationship between dam infrastructure and crop production. She processed satellite imagery from Google Earth Engine and PlanetLab in ArcGIS Pro, applied support vector machine classification, and used raster analysis techniques to distinguish opium poppies from other crops. Her findings contributed to a broader intelligence-based analysis of regional stability following the Taliban’s return to power in 2021.