Maysaa Sati

Maysaa Sati is an AI-driven urban systems researcher, planner, and founder working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, spatial analysis, and crisis response. She recently completed her Master's in City Planning at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, where her thesis, Navigating Identity and Place, examined displacement camps in Darfur as emergent urban systems shaped by informal governance, collective labor, and cultural identity. With a background in Architecture (University of Khartoum, BSc.) her research combined ethnographic fieldwork, spatial analytics, and computational methods to understand how communities reorganize space under conditions of protracted crisis.

She is the founder of AcaciaPulse, an AI-powered predictive displacement platform supported by the MIT DesignX Accelerator, where she led research design and data architecture to forecast displacement dynamics and inform humanitarian response. Through this work, she developed computational models that integrated social media monitoring, geospatial clustering, and qualitative intelligence to anticipate population movement patterns. She is also a recipient of the Andrea Chegut Fellowship, MISTI Africa Fellowship, and the MIT PKG Public Service Fellowship, which supported her work on conflict analytics, spatial resilience modeling, and AI-assisted mapping of urban systems under stress.

Across her research and entrepreneurial initiatives, Maysaa builds AI-enabled systems that bridge lived experience and institutional response. Her work integrates artificial intelligence, multilingual data pipelines, spatial modeling, and open-source intelligence to make community-generated information legible to planners, policymakers, and humanitarian actors. By combining grounded field research with computational infrastructure, she advances AI-assisted methodologies for equitable urban governance, humanitarian planning, and culturally grounded spatial policy.