Dr. Seema D. Iyer is Senior Director of The Hive at USA for UNHCR. Founded in 2015, The Hive’s mission is to engage with the American public to raise awareness about refugees and design solutions that address their needs through technology and the data science innovations. The Hive works with a broad network of refugee-supporting entities, including UNHCR’s Innovation Service to strengthen and fully-embed within the domestic and global ecosystem to better serve the needs of refugees. She established The Hive’s annual convening, #Innovate4Refugees: Data and Tech Forum, which convenes during the UN General Assembly in September to help cross-sector participants understand how advances in technology can be part of the solution during a refugee’s journey.
Seema began her research career in the 1990’s focused on urban migration patterns after the collapse of the Former Soviet Union and how cities planned for changing population realities. She is a contributor to the 2008 book Migration, Homeland and Belonging in Eurasia.
Prior to joining USA for UNHCR, she developed her data science skills to understand neighborhood change in urban areas like Baltimore, her hometown. She was the Director of the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance (BNIA), which is the local partner of the Urban Institute’s National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership that provides community-based data by inter-operationalizing public sector administrative data sets. She established the annual convening Baltimore Data Day to train community members on how to access and use neighborhood data.
To connect local indicators to global frameworks, she spearheaded Baltimore’s efforts to localize the newly-adopted UN Sustainable Development Goals in 2016. She was a 2017 Nehru-Fulbright scholar to understand how growing cities in India are using the SDGs for furthering economic competitiveness. She co-edited a 2021 book about the use of SDGs in North American Cities Promoting the Sustainable Development Goals in North American Cities. She received the 2020 Dean’s award for Public Service and the 2021 University System of Maryland Regents Award for Excellence in Public Service. She was also named a Baltimore Gamechanger in 2021 by Baltimore Magazine. She has a doctoral degree in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Michigan.