Karen Hao is a junior data scientist & contributor based in New York. She began her time at Quartz on the tech desk, covering the future of cities. Her work has also appeared in Mother Jones, Sierra Magazine, New Republic, and others. In another life, she was an application engineer at Flux.io (the first company to spin out of Google X) and performed research on urban food systems at the MIT Media Lab. She has a BS in mechanical engineering and minor in energy studies from MIT.