Melba Crawford

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 at the University of Texas, Austin, from 1990 to 2005, where she founded an interdisciplinary research and applications development program in space-based and airborne remote sensing. She was also a Jefferson Senior Science Fellow of the U.S. Department of State in 2004–2005. She is currently with Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, where she is the Nancy Uridil and Francis Bossu Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering and the Director of the Laboratory for Applications of Remote Sensing (LARS). She served on 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 and multiscale modeling for classification and prediction, with applications to agriculture and forestry.

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: Jan., 2024)

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