GRSS President 2013-2014
Melba M. Crawford (M’90–SM’05–F’08) received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in civil engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, and the Ph.D. degree in systems engineering from The Ohio State University, Columbus.
She was a faculty member with the University of Texas, Austin, from 1990 to 2005, where she founded an interdisciplinary research and applications development program in space-based and air- borne remote sensing. She is currently with Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, where she holds the Purdue Chair of Excellence in Earth Observation and where she is the Director of the Laboratory for Applications of Remote Sensing and the Associate Dean of Engineering for Research. She has served as a member of the NASA Earth System Science and Applications Advisory Committee and was a member of the NASA EO-1 Science Validation team for the Advanced Land Imager and Hyperion. Her research interests focus on hyperspectral and lidar sensing, data fusion for multisensor problems, manifold learning, and knowledge transfer in data mining.
Dr. Crawford was a Jefferson Senior Science Fellow of the U.S. Department of State in 2004–2005 and continues to serve in an advisory capacity. She is the Executive Vice President of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society. She is currently a member of an advisory committee for the IEEE Committee on Earth Observation to the South African Department of Science and Technology for capacity building in space technologies and remote sensing applications.
Dr. Crawford was the 2013 – 2014 President of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society and an Associate Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING. She has also served as Executive Vice President of the Society, Vice President for Conferences and Symposia, Vice President for Professional Activities, and Education Director of GRSS. (Date: June 2015)
