Mahya is a Research Scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's Hydrological Sciences Laboratory, working with SAIC. Her research focuses on leveraging satellite observations—particularly Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) from Sentinel-1 and NISAR—combined with advanced AI techniques, including geospatial foundation models, for applications in agriculture, vegetation water content estimation, and vegetation optical depth retrieval.
Mahya developed a global dataset to assess restoration potential for freshwater quality in support of the UN Freshwater Challenge. She is currently investigating the impact of wetland and riparian zone restoration on freshwater quality using optical imagery and geospatial foundation models for broad-scale generalization.
She is collaborating with Microsoft to develop a Hydrology Copilot for hydrological and drought monitoring analysis. This work leverages NASA's cutting-edge high-resolution (1 km) NLDAS-3 dataset and employs multi-agent systems and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures built with Azure AI Foundry.
Mahya also collaborates with the snow hydrology team at Goddard to estimate high-resolution snow water equivalent (SWE) by integrating optical, climate, and microwave data with geospatial foundation models, contributing toward a national-scale SWE product.