Dr. Jenny Du Receives David Landgrebe Award at IGARSS 2026
By Kevin P. Corbley
The prestigious IEEE GRSS David Landgrebe Award was bestowed upon Dr. Qian (Jenny) Du at the 2026 IGARSS Awards Banquet in Washington D.C. Dr. Du holds the Bobby Shackhouls Endowed Professorship in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Mississippi State University in Starkville, Mississippi.
Awarded annually at IGARSS, the David Landgrebe Award is considered one of the most prestigious honors given to a member of the geoscience and remote sensing profession. The award is a career achievement honor recognizing outstanding contributions in the field of remote sensing image analysis. The Landgrebe Award typically relates to advancements in Classification, Image Analysis, Feature Extraction, Change Detection, or Data Fusion/Mining.
“I am lucky and grateful to receive recognition this year for my career contributing to the advancement of hyperspectral image interpretation,” said Dr. Du.
Her contributions to hyperspectral imaging processing and algorithm design are extensive. As described on her personal website:
Dr. Du’s research field is digital image processing and its application to remote sensing problems with an expertise on hyperspectral image exploitation. The research she has conducted covers almost all the topics in remote sensing image processing and analysis, such as target detection, anomaly detection, change detection, supervised/unsupervised/semi-supervised classification, spectral unmixing, endmember extraction, dimensionality reduction, band selection, multisource data/feature/decision fusion, real-time processing, parallel computing, data compression, registration and mosaicking, sharpening, visualization, etc. Her research interests also include image super-resolution and neural networks.
In her latest research, Dr. Du is focused on the transition from statistical image processing analysis to AI-based algorithm design, especially in computer vision. The challenge is to make those AI deep learning models function well with publicly available hyperspectral data sets that tend to be low resolution and noisy. It’s relatively easy when there is a lot of training data, but her research team is determining how to make the models work when training data is sparse.
For Dr. Du, winning the Landgrebe Award is extra special because she met him on several occasions.
By way of context, Dr. Landgrebe was a world-class pioneer in the field of Earth observation and quantitative remote sensing. At the time of his death in 2020, he was Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Compute Engineering at Purdue University in Indiana. He was a founding member and director of Purdue’s Laboratory of Applied Remote Sensing (LARS). Landgrebe was deeply involved in development of the Landsat program and served as a GRSS president.
In her own words, Dr. Du tells the story of meeting Landgrebe:
I’m very honored to receive this award because it bears the name of Professor David Landgrebe. He is a pioneer in remote sense image analysis. When I was a graduate student 30 years ago, I studied his papers and books, and then when I attended IGARSS, my first IGARSS in 1998 in Seattle, he was a chair of my session. Oh wow!
So, you can imagine as a young researcher, a graduate student, the first time presenting in a large audience and in front of this distinguished professor whom I admired, it was very exciting, but also intimidating. But David Landgrebe, he was so nice. He led the discussion – full of insight and gave me great encouragement. So, I still have this memory.
It showed me not only what it means to be an outstanding scientist, but also how to encourage younger researchers and help them become part of the scientific community. I hope that, just as Professor Landgrebe encouraged me as a young researcher at my first IGARSS, I can offer the same encouragement and support to the next generation.
