Professional Member Spotlight
Dr. Delwyn Moller
Written by: Madeleine Dawson, Content and Design Staff for IEEE GRSS
Dr. Delwyn Moller is a radar remote sensing expert and adjunct professor at the University of Auckland. She also leads her own consulting business. Dr. Moller received her PhD in Electrical Engineering from University of Massachusetts Amherst, and went on to work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Since returning to New Zealand in 2018, Dr. Moller has been a driving force in building radar remote sensing capacity in the region. Through her leadership, the IEEE GRSS chapter has expanded its activities by launching student programs, hosting summer schools and guest lectures, and playing a central role in bringing IGARSS 2028 to New Zealand.
Can you introduce yourself and share a brief background about who you are and what you do?
I am a radar remote sensing person. I did my PhD in that at University of Massachusetts Amherst and then went to JPL where I worked again on radar remote sensing. I worked on the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, which was one of my first projects. I worked on lots of proof of concepts, kind of more of the precursor mission design, ground-based through airborne through spaceborne across all kinds of different mostly earth science missions. I really became engaged as I attended IGARSS many times so that is my community. I did not become as active in IEEE until I actually moved to New Zealand (NZ). I am originally from NZ, so I am a citizen. I moved back here in 2018.
It has been quite instrumental not only in staying connected with my international colleagues but also trying to establish a network down here and build that capacity here. It is a small country, and there are people around doing great work, but they are doing that to a large extent in isolation. So, trying to bring that community together and connect them with the broader international community is where GRSS has been fabulous.
How long have you been a member? Tell us about your GRSS journey.
I would have to look that up! I have attended IGARSS many times. I was a member for quite a while. I was meeting with a friend and colleague, Mahta Moghaddam. She said that I should be a member as she wanted to put in an application for me to be a senior member. That spurred the whole thing, and people contributed to making that happen. I was not that active until that point really.
When I moved down to NZ, I saw the benefit that it could have. Also, when I moved down here, there was no chapter, and that was horrifying to me. It took at least an initial attempt to gather people for a petition. Trying to find twelve eligible members was very difficult and it took a couple of tries. I finally got enough signatures to get the petition together. Since then, we have been continually growing. We are getting more members and becoming active… doing initiatives and being involved has been great. It has been quite instrumental having colleagues come down here and support things… we had a summer school. We have had guest lectures, so it has been amazing exposure, and that is continuing. We have a couple of DLR colleagues coming down, one this year to do a sabbatical, and one next year to do a sabbatical. They are also very active in IEEE, so they will be giving talks and seminars and supporting workshops. It is continuing to grow, which is amazing.
And it is going to culminate with New Zealand hosting IGARSS 2028!
What inspired you to join GRSS?
As I said that was my colleague at USC, Prof. Mahta Moghaddam, who has been quite active. She said that there really is benefit to all of this. Because you know you can get on all kinds of committees and they take a lot of time, so I really pick and choose what I dedicate my time to, because I am really busy. So, I listened to her and she was absolutely right! That is when I put in the application for senior membership, and she was the one that pushed me to do it.
There was a second person that kind of called a favor to me to be the co-chair of the Instrumentation and Future Technologies, IFT, working group. Again, I was kind of questioning how much time that would take, but it ended up being a very worthwhile thing and I am still on it today. One person pushed me over the edge, and the second really pulled me into the fold. That was Marwan Younis at DLR.
How has GRSS contributed to your professional growth?
I had a global community, but GRSS really cemented some of those connections once I moved to such a far-flung place [New Zealand]. It has enabled me to tap into some of those connections, because it has provided funding for support of visiting lecturers and those kind of things…a greater network that I can bring domestic colleagues into and put them into that network. Also, it really has enabled me to do domestic networking to find students to work with. I have had a number of students that have worked on my research projects and have done internships. That starts to snowball and build out. Then bringing in people to work with those students and give them visibility. It starts building a capability down here. At first when I moved down here, I was so used to a large community, but remote sensing especially on the instrumentation side, there is not a lot of activity, but it is starting to grow. GRSS has been absolutely key in that for me.
What advice would you give to individuals considering joining the GRSS community?
Well, I would absolutely say join but take advantage of it! It is something to pay your membership and all the rest but try to get involved. There are initiatives you can get involved in, and there is funding you can get to seed initiatives that can be quite meaningful. It is a community, and it is as good as the effort you give. You’ll get out of it more than you put into it, but you need to put something into it.
What has your experience been like leading a GRSS chapter? Any challenges and how have you addressed them?
I found that figuring out how to navigate within IEEE and GRSS presents a learning curve. Just on the administrative and bureaucratic side, there is a bit of a tangled web. But there is a lot of support available, so as long as you are not afraid to ask silly questions, the technical side is almost the easy part. [Some things to figure out were] how do you navigate and do some of the admin or procedural stuff such as applying for funding, and how you go through that process. I think that is where you really need to be linked in with working groups so if you have an idea you can be presented with how to make it happen. It becomes knowing who to go to and who to ask and not being afraid to ask.
Also, we are a contiguous chapter. New Zealand has three regions: North, Central, and South. We span all of them, which I love, but now we have IEEE members from all three so managing funding [can be challenging]. Turns out that New Zealand North manages the funding, even though we are contiguous chapter across all sections. It makes things a bit complicated. We are relatively small, but we are growing so it was a bit complicated to figure out how that works.
And then there are our Pacific Island neighbors who don’t have chapters, and they are very small, but we figure out how to work with them to get initiatives going when they don’t have a chapter…trying to bring them under our auspices a bit so that we can support them with some projects. We have done that a couple of times now. We have had great support from New Zealand IEEE to do the administrative side of things and support those projects going forward.
Why do you think establishing a chapter in your region is important and how do you maintain cadence in membership?
There is always a struggle because it is volunteer time. There is also a struggle in terms of finding people that have the time and energy to also volunteer. So, it must be bigger than just me. We have tipped that scale when you find those people that see the benefits and see the potential and they start doing their own initiatives and workshops. We have been primarily reaching out to grow within the academic institutions. Everybody is welcome, but that is where we have had events such as summer schools, and hackathons. Those type of events are things that we have
done and will continue to do. And fortunately, there is an early career post doc who has become very engaged and started to propose initiatives around capacity building.
I am an engineer, so I like projects, and we have a high school student project going on at the moment. We are building up GNSS IR sensors and we are working on constructing and experiment design. We did it last year and had just four students, and this year there are 12. We got more streamlined this year, and there are sub- teams depending on their interest. We are bringing in several academics from across the country to talk to them, because in the next year or so most of them will go into STEM fields. They talk with them about the potentials of different areas that they could go into and all aspects of STEM, and GRSS from analysis through to instrumentation. For me, if you are doing something…to see its fun and it’s under the banner of GRSS and IFT. Then, they take their project and present at the New Zealand Aerospace Summit. To me it’s the best advertisement so when they go into mechanical engineering, rocketry, or aerospace or whatever field, the project, writeup, and experiment really gives them a leapfrog into their fields.
Also, we have had a hackathon, a workshop, summer school, and then we had some guest lecturers give seminars. We hosted a conference on remote sensing and AI, machine learning. Someone else organized it, but that was under our chapter, and that was highly successful. MIGARS was the conference. These all help to maintain and grow membership.
What has been achieved in your chapter that you are proud of?
I think the growth and connection. To me the sign of success is if it enables collaborations that might not have happened otherwise, or projects that might not have happened otherwise. It grows beyond GRSS.
For example, personally, it has enabled me to find several students who have ended up coming and working for me either in my university role or with my private company. I would not have known of these students if it was not for GRSS. That to me is a sign of success that we are starting to grow as a community.
What is your vision for the future of your chapter?
Across the spectrum in New Zealand, we have certain strength areas where we have a lot of activity, but then we had areas where there is not much happening, such as radar remote sensing. I would like to see that grow, because that is what I do, and I like the community that I work with as those are resources for me. That is part of the benefit of being on the IFT working group, and having a presence down here, because that is where I want to see capacity grow and more activity at the educational stage. If we can get some programs going within the universities, then we are producing engineers to do the kind of stuff I like to do. We have the interpretation of satellite products that come from those types of sensors, but if you understand the underlying physics and instrumentation, you are going to do that much better in terms of the data analysis.
Do you have anything else to add?
There will be a presence at IGARSS 2025 in Brisbane. We have a number of students going over to represent New Zealand and promote for IGARSS 2028. It will be taking our visibility internationally for the first time. It will be really exciting to get exposure to the larger GRSS community for some of those undergraduates and early career professionals.
Find more information on Dr. Moller at this link: www.linkedin.com/in/delwyn-moller-b5747477/
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