Albert Yu-Min Lin

Dr. Albert Yu-Min Lin is a Research Scientist at the University of California, San Diego and an Emerging Explorer of the National Geographic Society in the field of technology enabled exploration.

He has founded and directed numerous programs including the UC San Diego, National Geographic Engineers for Exploration Program, the Exploration Lab, the Distributed Health Labs and the international effort known as the Valley of the Khans Project. Based at the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at UC San DIego he pushes the limits of field based research.

Albert's research has taken him into the most remote regions of the world, has led to industry changing innovations, and has expanded the role of media in science. His work has been featured in outlets including the Washington Post, BBC, NPR, ABC news, TEDx, Wired magazine, Gizmodo, al Jazeera, National Geographic, Newsweek (cover story), and the Harvard Business Review. The effort he is most known for, the Valley of the Khans Project, is a hight tech ground, aerial and satellite based remote sensing non-destructive search for the tomb of Genghis Khan that was featured in a 1-hour National Geographic Documentary film, "the Forbidden Tomb of Genghis Khan", which he also narrated. The goal of this effort, to enable international protection of a sacred region of Mongolia through non-destructive investigation, earned him recognition as National Geographic Adventure Magazines "2010 Readers Choice Adventurer of the Year" and the 2011 Lowell Thomas Medal for Exploration from the renowned New York based Explorers Club. His team's use of digital media to perform massive satellite data analytics through crowdsourcing (recognized with the 2011 United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation Academic Achievement award) has been emulated for applications ranging from emergency response to humanitarian monitoring and led to the formation of California based Tomnod Inc. where he served as co-Founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors until 2013 when the company was successfully acquired by the Colorado based commercial satellite imagery provider Digital Globe. He has been invited to present his work on massive scale collaboration and crowd based collective intelligence to organizations including the US Geospatial Intelligence Agency, Harvard Business School, and the Department of Defense at the Pentagon.

Albert continues to advocate science education through public engagement, working within organizations including the National Geographic Speakers Bureau and the US State Department as well as programs such as the Google Science Fair and SciFest Africa to expand the scope of curiosity world wide. Recently, his work in public television media to advance the mission of conservation and exploration at National Geographic was recognized with the 2012 News and Documentary Emmy award in the category of best promotional announcement. Albert is an avid rock climber, surfer, mountaineer, photographer, sailor, and traveler. His Chinese name (Yu-Min) roughly translates to Citizen of the Universe.