About

Short bio

Dr. María Piles was born in Valencia, Spain, in 1982. She received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in telecommunication engineering from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), València, in 2005 and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain, in 2010, respectively. In 2010, she joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia, as a Research Fellow. From 2011 to 2016, she was a Research Scientist at the Department of Signal Theory and Communications, UPC, actively participating in Barcelona Expert Center (BEC) activities. During these years, she was also a Research Affiliate at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston. In 2016, she joined the Institute of Marine Sciences, CSIC, as a Research Scientist. In 2017 she joined the Image & Signal Processing (ISP, https://isp.uv.es/) group at Universitat de València (UV) as a Ramón y Cajal Senior Researcher. Since 2023, she is Associate Professor and Senior Research Scientist at UV.

Dr. María Piles research activity is centered on remote sensing for Earth observation, with special emphasis on microwave radiometers, radars, and hyperspectral sensors, retrieval of soil moisture and vegetation biogeophysical parameters, development of multi-sensor techniques for enhanced retrievals with a focus on agriculture, forestry, wildfire prevention, detection of extremes and climate studies. She is actively involved in the scientific activities of the ESA's SMOS and NASA's SMAP missions and is a member of the Mission Advisory Group (MAG) of the Copernicus Imaging Microwave Radiometer (CIMR, https://cimr.eu/). She is also currently engaged in research projects that use machine learning to exploit Earth Observation data (see Projects), with a focus on the development of data-driven models that respect physical laws, causal inference, and on learning and explaining feature representations. She has published more than 70 papers (>4400 citations) in international peer-reviewed journals, 3 book chapters, and more than 80 international conference presentations (8 invited). She received the Med-Storm Prize for Young Researchers at the EGU Plinius conference (2009) and the UPC special doctoral award in Information Technology and Communication (2012). She has been awarded the MIT-Spain/La Cambra de Barcelona Seed Fund (2010-2012), the MIT-MISTI Global Seed Fund (2014-2015), the BBVA fund to young researchers (2015), and the ESA Climate Change Initiative Soil Moisture Visiting Scientist Award (2017). She is an external reviewer for the European Commission and other public R&D centers from EU members. She is an IEEE Senior Member (2019), board member of the IEEE Spain Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society chapter (GRSS), and ELLIS fellow (2021).

Formal education

2006–2010          Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) – PhD in Remote Sensing

2000–2005          Universitat Politècnica de Valencia (UPV) – BSc and MSc in Telecommunication Engineering

Professional Experience

2017 - present   Ramón y Cajal Senior Researcher - ISP, Image Processing Laboratory, Universitat de València

2016–2017         Research Scientist – Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), ICM, Barcelona Expert Center

2011–2016         Research Fellow – Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya/IEEC, Dept. Signal Theory & Comm.

2011–2016        Research Affiliate – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. Civil and Environmental Eng.

2010–2011        Research Scientist – Melbourne University, Dept. Civil and Environmental Engineering