GRSS President 2010
Alberto Moreira (M’92, S’96, F’04) received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in electrical engineering from the Aeronautical Technological Institute (ITA), São José dos Campos, in 1984 and 1986, respectively, and his Ph.D. degree (with honors) from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, in 1993. From 1996 to 2001, he was the head of the SAR Technology Department at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany. Under his leadership, the DLR’s airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) system has been upgraded to operate in innovative imaging modes such as polarimetric SAR interferometry, tomography, and holography. Since 2001, Prof. Moreira has been the Director of the Microwaves and Radar Institute at DLR and a Full Professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), in the field of microwave remote sensing. His DLR’s Institute contributes to several scientific programs and projects for spaceborne SAR missions for example TerraSAR‐X, TanDEM‐X, HRWS, SAR‐Lupe, and SARah as well as Kompsat-6, PAZ, Sentinel‐1, BIOMASS, ROSE‐L, Harmony, Sentinel-1NG, Envision and VERITAS. The TanDEM‐X mission, led by his Institute, has generated a global, high-resolution digital elevation model of the Earth with unprecedented accuracy. Prof. Moreira is the initiator and Principal Investigator (PI) for this mission. From 2012 to 2018 he served as Principal Investigator for the Helmholtz Alliance “Remote Sensing and Earth System Dynamics”. He has served as a member of the ESA Mission Advisory Groups of ENVISAT/ASAR, Sentinel-1, and Hydroterra, and is currently serving as a member of the Science Study Team for the ESA’s EnVision mission.
Prof. Moreira has authored or co‐authored more than 500 publications in international conferences and journals, 8 book chapters, and holds more than 45 patents in the radar and antenna field. He has supervised or co-supervised more than 50 Ph.D. students and has regularly served as a lecturer in international courses and summer schools. His professional interests and research areas encompass end-to-end radar system design and analysis, innovative microwave techniques and system concepts, signal processing, and remote sensing applications.
Prof. Moreira is an IEEE Fellow, has served as President of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) in 2010, and was a member of the IEEE GRSS Administrative Committee (1999 – 2001, 2004 – 2013). He was the founder and chair of the GRSS German Chapter (2003-2008), served as Associate Editor for the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters (2003-2007) and for the IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (since 2005), and he has been serving as chair of the Major Awards of the GRS Society since 2017. He and his colleagues received the IEEE GRSS Transactions Prize Paper Awards in 1997, 2001, and 2007, and the IEEE GRSS Letters Prize Paper Award in 2015 and 2017. Prof. Moreira is also a recipient of several international awards, including the IEEE AESS Nathanson Award (1999) for the Young Engineer of the Year, the IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Technical Field Award (2007), the IEEE W.R.G. Baker Award from the IEEE Board of Directors (2012), the IEEE GRSS Distinguished Achievement Award (2014), and the IEEE Dennis J. Picard Medal (2023) for “leadership and innovative concepts in the design, deployment, and utilization of airborne and space-based radar systems”. (Jan., 2024)
