Professional Member Spotlight: Dr. Raffaella Guida

It was quite an opportunistic start as I was graduating in 2003. I was a student at the University of Naples Federico II preparing a Master thesis on SAR raw signal simulation. One of my supervisors, Prof. Antonio Iodice, recommended to consider being a student member as there was a prize for the best thesis in the South Italy chapter. He proposed to submit my thesis [to the competition], which was the right thing to do, because I won together with two other colleagues.
My supervisor explained to me that I needed to become a member in order to take advantage of this opportunity before we applied, so that was the start of my journey. As my experience shows, you start in an opportunistic way, but then after twenty more years you are still a member, you have witnessed the benefits of the community behind this.

Then, I became a regular member in 2007. I did not create an application yet to become a senior member…probably next year, as over the past two years all my attention now has been focused on re-establishing and leading the UK chapter. We will see what the future will hold.

My supervisor was the one that first helped me to begin my journey, however, the community of GRSS is what really helped things to become clear. With experience and becoming a senior member in the sector, you realize it is important to have a community of like-minded people to share interest and exchange ideas.

One of the problems on the opposite side when I came to the UK from Italy was that there was a lack of community to support me in my journey. Not having a community behind you can affect your professional growth in a negative way.  That is what really inspired me to make sure there is a community here to support and share my ideas with.

So, of course, that opportunity of having a GRSS network was so important to me, and I immediately experienced the benefit during my PhD. Thanks to the GRSS community and network of one of my PhD supervisors, Prof Daniele Riccio, I was able to join the remote sensing group at the Technical University in Munich (TUM) as visiting scientist under the supervision of Prof Uwe Stilla, to collaborate with his PhD student Dr. Karin Hedman. That group was at the university, but was also working closely with DLR. And this was all possible because my supervisors Prof Riccio and Prof Stilla, in the same GRSS network, previously discussed about students mobility between their respective Universities which, indeed, continued in the following years.

Another PhD student that worked with me in Munich that year, Dr. Giovanna Trianni, was supervised at that time by Prof Paolo Gamba. We were all very supported in our efforts as PhD students, because our supervisors were all well connected together, exchanging ideas, appreciating the opportunities and value of exchange and mobility of PhD students. If my supervisor had not been in the community itself, probably this wouldn’t have happened.

In my experience as a PhD student, I benefitted from this community and from being a member of GRSS. That contributed to my professional growth as it gave me more opportunities than other people had.

Also, there were other small benefits. For example, I wanted to complete my PhD with at least the participation to a key conference like IGARSS in my curriculum. At the time, it was difficult for my University to fund student travel, and I believe that the 2006 IGARSS in Denver, Colorado may have been the first year that the travel grant was proposed. I immediately applied for it and won. It allowed me to join the conference and connect with the community for the first time in person. I really appreciated this for my professional growth.

Now, as an academic in the UK… when I moved to Surrey in 2008, I really wanted to grow interest in the subject, because I am very passionate about the society. But above all, I am passionate about the subject and the discipline of remote sensing and earth observation. I thought I could leverage on the strong industrial links and partnerships that the Surrey Space Centre, in which I was based, had with the space sector and space industries. I wanted to take advantage of them to overcome one of the most difficult challenges as a researcher which is getting the right data to validate [your research]. This was the really big thing about being in the UK. With their pragmatism, they were very helpful in this aspect of providing me with the data I needed. I had contacts with companies that were flying campaigns to prove the quality of a new camera or a new sensor. They could simply share the data to let me play with that. So this really helped a lot and I hoped to bring that interest into the society, which was a bit disconnected when I joined.

The community that I loved and experienced when I was in Italy and Germany was quite missing in the UK. In the UK, the remote sensing expertise is more industrial than academic. GRSS is quite an academic society even if it is for everyone. The largest challenge was that there was not a community present. The chapter was already established when I came, however, it was inactive for around three years. There was not much that was happening locally. This will be a problem in the long term, because if you do not grow a local community, then you cannot grow interest in the subject. This probably means that you will have problems recruiting PhD students, and attracting local talent.

This is something we needed to correct, so I contacted the society in a member role to understand what was going on. Those were some of the biggest challenges that I had. It was very difficult to reconnect everyone. For me, it was a big learning curve, because I was a member, but I was not a volunteer and did not led any other chapters within the society. So, when I wrote to GRSS, they told me that there were a few other people with the same concerns and had an interest in resuming the activities of the chapter. Then they asked if I was interested in volunteering for that, so I said yes!

This is how the chapter began. We started re-connecting with members, and speaking to people before we could formalize the chapter membership. It was quite challenging because, after many years of Chapter inactivity, people lost some trust. For example, it was really difficult to have people present at the first technical meeting, but things started changing. When you persevere in these things, you really see the benefit. We discussed the problems and needs, such as proposals for professionals and seminar programs. We started by organizing a few technical meetings once a month for 30 minutes to quickly share information. We remind others of conferences, travel grants, and professional events. Then, we use some of the time we have to discuss what people wish to have from the Chapter. This effort in listening to people is what made everyone closer again to the chapter. Little by little we managed to propose a few other things.

It was hard at first to understand the system such as the difference between chapters, and sections, how to go about growing membership, and connecting.

As previously mentioned, there was a lack of local community that was a problem. It became clear that you need to keep relations with the world, but also you need to grow a local community otherwise sustainability-wise it will not go far locally. That was the reason why really establishing the chapter was important to us.

In terms of membership, we have witnessed a growth that we have sustained and maintained. That is what matters to us. We managed this by avoiding static channels, and moving to a more dynamic like our LinkedIn channel. This helped us to communicate to members quickly, but also reach other interested people that might become members in future. We are very disciplined in posting and organizing our events in a regular way. We opened them to other members of other chapters, and promoted to anyone else in the discipline that would be interested. We are quite good now in preparing the catchy flyers and information to attract more members. The last event, we ended up having 130 people registered. Considering we started by 3 members, we were very proud of that.

Something I am very proud of is the seminar program, because when we started, we did not have anything. Giving something back to the members is more important than receiving something from them. I am happy that I spend time with my colleagues looking for speakers, and organizing the flyers to help reconnect the community.

The problem of a community that was quite absent in UK was reflected in IGARSS attendance. You clearly see there that the UK & Ireland GRS community is not really well represented. So one of the visions that I have for the future is to grow the UK & Ireland presence and influence in the larger events that the society organizes.

I also have the wish of bringing to the chapter my personal experience. I am very much into sustainability and digital platforms. I do not think that we can think of a future with remote sensing without being more focused and more driven by the urgency of developing applications that can solve real problems. I am a researcher that went from simulations of SAR raw signals to applications, and I like the technical journey I made. But I think now is the time to contribute more to the solutions of problems in a practical way. I would like to see what we can develop in operational environments. This personal experience and the support of the community, which is very much impact-driven, can help to put all of these things together: remote sensing, earth observation and sustainability.