Marcel Meyer

Since summer 2022

Geospatial Analyst for Peace and Conflict in the Peace and Development Team (PDU) at the UN Resident Coordinator Office (RCO) in Kenya.

Stations:

• Studies in Geography and Physics
• PhD Botanical Epidemiology
• Post-Doc Botanical Epidemiology at the University of Cambridge and Post-Doc Climate Sciences at the University of Hamburg
• Consultant in the financial sector
• Consultant in the Peace and Development Team (PDU) at the UN Resident Coordinator Office in Nairobi

In the UN Resident Coordinator Office I am responsible...

for the processing of data and for translating data to action. The RCO coordinates UN activities in the region. I work on a wide range of activities:

One of the central projects, which I support technically and in project management, analyses hate speech and misinformation in social media and uses influencers and artificial intelligence to send peace messages to young people. In another project, I am designing and implementing a dashboard for interactive data analysis and visualisation for the UN team. Here, the focus was initially on elections. For example, we generated interactive maps that election observers could use. Now the dashboard covers a broad  range of topics. My tasks also include electronic reporting, creating a prototype for a progressive web app in collaboration with a national partner and writing inter-sectional risk analyses. In an exciting pilot-study, we are currently testing a machine learning model to predict political violence in Kenya.

Why go on a peace mission?

I went to Kenya to support prevention and peacebuilding with methods from the fields of data analysis, data visualisation and computer simulation. The post requires combining different areas of my education and work experiences: International Development, Sustainability, Applied Science Research and Data Analysis. For me, working as a data scientist at the UN is also an attempt to build bridges between quantitative and qualitative ways of working.

The biggest challenge...  

...so far has been bridging gaps between different communication norms and workflows - not so much between Kenyan and German culture, but rather between applied scientific research and operational project work in the UN. After a somewhat turbulent initial phase, this now seems to be working well thanks to a wonderful team.

"My work activities are diverse, time-consuming – and very exciting’!"