Cheryl Desha serves as a Council Member of the International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE). She is based in Brisbane (Queensland, Australia), at Griffith University, where she is the Theme Leader 'Digital Earth and Resilient Infrastructure' in the Cities Research Institute, and the Engagement Director, Industry in the School of Engineering and Built Environment (Sciences Group). Cheryl recently oversaw the completion of a new 6-storey building for the University's Nathan campus (Brisbane), which is fitted out to include a Disaster and Resilience Management Facility.

For the last two decades, Cheryl has been working to build capacity for sustainable development, as an environmental engineer and more recently within the spatial and geospatial community in Australia and internationally. Her research focus is on decision support for always-on decision-making environments, dealing with pragmatic and consistent decision-making in the face of fatigue, reduced resources and protracted timeframes. Over the years this has focused on the topic areas of energy and energy efficiency, in addition to infrastructure resilience, biomimetic and biophilic solutions. It has included collaboration with the Japanese ISDE chapter, creating coursework in disaster management and resilience. 

Cheryl graduated from Environmental Engineering and has a doctorate in rapid capacity building within highly regulated environments. She has previously served on the Board of the Energy Efficiency Council of Australia (EEC), and is an elected member of the United Nations Global Geospatial Information Management (UNGGIM) - Academic Network, including the membership of the UNGGIM Working Group - Disasters. In 2020, she was awarded the Queensland Government's IGEM Champion of Change Award by the Inspector General Emergency Management.