Simon H. Yueh is the SMAP Project Scientist at the NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering in 1991 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In September 1991, he joined the Radar Science and Engineering Section at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He was the supervisor of radar system engineering and algorithm development group from 2002-2007, the deputy manager of Climate, Oceans and Solid Earth section from July 2007 to March 2009, and the section manager from April 2009 to Jan 2013. He served as the Project Scientist of the NASA Aquarius mission from January 2012 to September 2013, and the SMAP Project Scientist since October 2013. He has been the Principal/Co-Investigator of numerous NASA and DOD research projects on remote sensing of ocean salinity, ocean wind, terrestrial snow and soil moisture. He received the IEEE GRSS Service Award in 2023. He was an associate editor of Radio Science from 2002 to 2006 and the Editor in Chief of IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing from 2018-2022. 

Zsofia Kugler is the local organizer of the 2024 ISMS, Budapest. She is the director of the Knowledge Center for Water Sciences and Disaster Mitigation at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME), Hungary. Following her MSc. from the University of Salzburg in 2002 she worked as an intern at the German Aerospace Center in Munich. She received the Ph.D. degree in Civil Engineering in 2008 from BME. She studied a trimester at Cambridge University, Corpus Christi College. From 2006 she has been working for the EC - Joint Research Center on the Global Flood Detection System. She was a visiting scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory with the support of Fulbright and Rosztoczy award in 2022 and 2024 respectively. Her main research field is passive microwave radiometry for global streamflow monitoring. She is a member of the IEEE GRSS and advisor of student branch chapter. She is co-chairing the ISPRS working ground III/IV on remote sensing data quality. 

Prof.  Siqueira is the Ecosystems Science Lead for NISAR. He is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and is co-Director of the University’s Microwave Remote Sensing Laboratory (MIRSL). In previous appointments, he has been a senior engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a visiting scientist for the European Commission in Ispra, Italy, and a Bullard Fellow at Harvard’s forest research station in Massachusetts. His work within MIRSL is in the design, development and use of microwave remote sensing instruments for earth science applications. While at UMass, Professor Siqueira has developed airborne Interferometric SAR’s that work at S-, Ku- and Ka-band frequencies, which are used for studying the remote sensing signatures of vegetation, soils, and snow. Professor Siqueira is the Ecosystems Science Lead for NISAR, a joint NASA/ISRO L- and S-band SAR mission. He is also the PI for Snow Water Equivalent Wide-swath Interferometer and scatterometer (known as SNOWWI) which is an airborne instrument and satellite constellation concept that is being developed for NASA-ESTO’s Instrument Incubator Program. He was the host for the first GRSS-sponsored Soil Moisture School in Amherst.

Seung-bum Kim is with the NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He received the B.Sc. degree from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University College London, England. He was a scientist at Remote Sensing Systems, California, developing the L-band radiometry retrieval of the Aquarius salinity observation; is with the Jet Propulsion Lab. The current research includes modeling, retrieval and applications of radar observations (soil moisture, precision irrigation, landslide, wildfire). He has served as members of the science teams of NASA satellites (Aquarius, SMAP, CYGNSS, NISAR, and Earth Venture).

Peter Weston works in the coupled data assimilation team at ECMWF in Bonn, Germany. He works on land data assimilation and how this is coupled to the atmospheric data assimilation in the ECMWF NWP system. He has worked with many different types of remote sensing data including infrared and microwave radiances for the atmosphere and more recently microwave radiances for soil moisture from SMOS and SMAP. He has been an active member of the SMOS quality working group and has worked on the passive monitoring of SMOS/SMAP data as well as the development, maintenance and assimilation of a SMOS neural network-based soil moisture product.

Dr. Rajat Bindlish is the SMAP deputy Project Scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA. He received the B.S. degree in civil engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, Mumbai, India, in 1993, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in civil engineering from The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA, in 1996 and 2000, respectively. Prior to this, he was with USDA Agricultural Research Service, Hydrology and Remote Sensing Laboratory, Beltsville, MD. His research interests involve the application of microwave remote sensing in hydrology. He is currently working on soil moisture estimation from microwave sensors and their subsequent application in land surface hydrology. He has developed soil moisture algorithms for multiple airborne sensors (PSR and PALS). He has worked on soil moisture algorithms from AMSR-E, SMOS, AMSR2, Aquarius, and SMAP missions. He is a science team member of NISAR, and GCOM-W missions.

Klaus Scipal is Mission Manager for the SMOS and BIOMASS at ESA. He received the MSc degree in geodesy in 1999 and the PhD degree in technical sciences in 2002 from Vienna University of Technology in Austria. He has been working as a scientist at the Institute of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing of the Vienna University of Technology and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in the fields of earth observation and data assimilation with a focus on land surface processes. In 2009 he joined the Space Research and Technology Centre of the European Space Agency in the Netherlands as Mission Scientist working on the development of future SAR satellite concepts. In 2020 he moved to ESA’s Center for Earth Observation in Italy and was appointed Mission Manager for the SMOS and BIOMASS satellite missions.

Prof. Narendra N. Das is an Associate Professor at Michigan State University (MSU) since November 2021, in the departments of Biosystems & Agricultural Engineering and Civil & Environmental Engineering. Before joining MSU, he worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for approximately 14 years. He is renowned for his expertise in remote sensing in hydrology and earth sciences, specializing in microwave remote sensing of soil moisture, soil physics, and hydrologic and crop modeling. He is one of the pioneers of the microwave active- passive algorithm for high resolution soil moisture. He is an esteemed member of the NASA Science Team for the SMAP and NISAR missions, contributing to the development of high- resolution, active-passive soil moisture data on a global scale. His research focuses on optimizing soil physical and hydraulic properties using SMAP satellite products to enhance agricultural water resource management. Additionally, Dr. Das is actively involved in creating cost-effective soil moisture sensors and advancing the field through his innovative work and extensive teaching experience.

Dr. Mehmet Kurum is an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Georgia. He received his B.S. degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, in 2003, followed by his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA, in 2005 and 2009, respectively. He held Postdoctoral and Research Associate positions with the Hydrological Sciences Laboratory, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA. From 2016 to 2022, he served as an Assistant Professor at Mississippi State University (MSU). Currently, he is an Associate Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Georgia, while also serving as an Adjunct Professor at MSU. He is an expert in microwave remote sensing research, including the development of soil moisture retrieval algorithms and forward electromagnetics model simulations in support of the NASA SMAP, SNOOPI, NISAR and CYGNSS missions. He has expertise not only in experimental system development but also in signal processing and electromagnetics.

Jeffrey Walker is a Professor at Monash University in Australia. He completed his B.E. (Civil) and B.Surveying degrees in 1995 from the University of Newcastle, Australia, and his Ph.D. in Water Resources Engineering from the same University in 1999.  He then joined NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre to implement his soil moisture work globally.  In 2001 he moved to the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Melbourne as Lecturer, where he continued his soil moisture work, including development of the only Australian airborne capability for simulating new satellite missions for soil moisture.  He is contributing to soil moisture satellite missions at NASA, ESA and JAXA, as a Science Team member for the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission and Cal/val Team member for the SMOS and Global Change Observation Mission – Water (GCOM-W) respectively.

Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Spain since 2007, and an IEEE Fellow since 2011. His research interests are focused on the development of instruments and techniques for soil moisture, vegetation, sea salinity, sea ice observations etc. using: microwave radiometry/microwave radiometry by aperture synthesis and signals of opportunity (GNSS-R), development of radio frequency interference detection and mitigation techniques, ionospheric propagation, and nanosatellites as a tool to test innovative remote sensors.

David B. Kunkee is an IEEE GRSS representative. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, in 1995.  He joined The Aerospace Corporation in 1995 and is currently Senior Project Leader within the Sensor Systems Subdivision.  From 2010 to 2014 he was a member of the Environmental Satellite Systems Division as part of the Defense Weather Satellite System (DWSS) and Weather System Follow-on (WSF) program offices.  From 2006 to 2010 he was a member of the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) Integrated Program Office (IPO) and led the Aerospace Microwave Sensors and Data Products Department within the NPOESS IPO. In 2021 he was President for the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS). Dr. Kunkee is the current Secretary of USNC-URSI Commission F and has served on the National Academies’ Committee on Radio Frequencies (CORF) including its Committee on Scientific Use of the Radio Spectrum.

Roger Jové-Casulleras is CEO and co-founder of Microwave Sensors and Electronics SL (MWSE). He received the PhD in Aerospace Science and Technology from the Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain, in 2015. As a CEO and co-founder of Microwave Sensors and Electronics SL (MWSE), he leads the funding acquisition, and the field test campaigns of the sensors developed. His main research interest is the application of near-ground remote sensing by microwave sensors.