An Education Initiative for Applied Radar Remote Sensing on behalf of DLR

Prof. Christiane Schmullius

Friedrich-Schiller-University

Dr. Christiane Schmullius is professor and chairs the Department for Earth Observation at the Faculty for Chemistry and Geosciences, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena in Germany. Her M.Sc. thesis at the Remote Sensing Lab of the Institute of Geography, University of California at Santa Barbara, focussed on Landsat-based agricultural monitoring of the Veneto region in Italy. For her PhD at the Institute of Space Sciences, Free University Berlin, she turned to radar remote sensing of crops. From 1991-2000, she headed the Geomatics-group at the Institute for Radio Frequency Technology, German Aerospace Center (DLR), and was Science Team Lead for the two NASA-DLR-ASI SIR-C/X-SAR radar shuttle missions in 1994 and DLR’s project scientist for the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) in February 2000. Since January 2000, she is as full professor in Jena, Germany. Prof. Schmullius developed a comprehensive remote sensing curricula for BSc students and a joint M.Sc. degree in Geoinformatics and Remote Sensing. Part of the education is training through involvement in application projects. Graduates of the Jena Earth Observation School are hired in research agencies and companies nationally and internationally. In 2010, Prof. Schmullius received the German Federal Cross of Merit for these achievements in Earth observation education. Since 2012, her department coordinates the DLR-project SAR-EDU, a joint national programme of leading radar application scientists that has resulted in over 2300 educational slides organised in 40 lessons and 12 tutorials. The material is accompanied by 8 sample data sets and 24 hours of video lectures. Recently, SAR-EDU has been extended on an ESA-grant to develop a Radar MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). Prof. Schmullius’ research focuses on terrestrial applications ranging from operational vegetation mapping (specifically biomass), land cover to soil moisture monitoring with an emphasis on radar data. She has co-authored 90 peer-reviewed articles and has written two book chapters. She is a member of DLR’s and GOFC-GOLD’s Steering Committees and had been participating in CEOS’ Carbon Task Force, ESA’s Science Advisory Committee, ESF’s European Space Science Council and the European FP7 Space Advisory Group. She is the programme chair for the International Astronautical Congress in Bremen in 2018.