By Lauren Ingeno
Qianyi Zhao, M.S. ’08, Ph.D. ’13, has been selected as a winner of the 2013 Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation Award for his dissertation on microwave remote sensing of the Earth's environment.
The Swiss-based award, established in 1992, recognizes the exceptional research achievements of people under the age of 30 from around the world, who are studying in the fields of advance data processing technology, life sciences and sustainability.
Dr. Zhao, who earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering at Southeast University in Nanjing, China, is a recent alumnus and current lecturer in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) within the George Washington University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. He was supervised by Professor Roger Lang, and his application for the award was supported by ECE Department Chair Mona Zaghloul.
“I feel very honored to have received this award. It is also a motivation for me to explore more in this field,” Dr. Zhao said. “This topic is truly cross-disciplinary as well as international.”
The object of remote sensing is to use aerial sensor technologies to acquire information about the Earth’s environment without having to make physical contact with a particular object.
Dr. Zhao’s dissertation, titled “Methodology of Modeling Multiple Scattering Effects in Microwave Remote Sensing of Vegetation,” focuses on the field of forestry. Remote sensing is a useful tool for assessing environmental conditions of forests and can help predict things like the directions and speeds of forest fires as well as determine the compatibility of the climate with forest growth.
“Foresters worry about trees dying or being burned by forest fires. And they are interested, for example, in the soil moisture underneath a tree. So you need to know the property of the tree,” said Dr. Lang. “And we can’t go around measuring every forest in the world.”
That is where Dr. Zhao’s research comes into the picture. Twenty years ago, Dr. Lang conducted a remote sensing experiment in Italy, by measuring the scatter from a tree in a controlled environment. Dr. Zhao’s work expands on that research and advances the tree models.
His project uses radar to measure forest biomass, aiming to increase the accuracy of microwave forest models by studying the radar response from trees.
He has presented his research at conferences around the world, and was recently published in the IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.
In addition to research, Dr. Zhao has greatly enjoyed his teaching experience at GW. This year the university awarded him the Philip J. Amsterdam Graduate Teaching Award for teaching contributions.
After seven years at GW, Dr. Zhao said the university has become his “home.”
“I like the environment here at GW in terms of research and teaching and community,” Dr. Zhao said. “I’m going to miss it here very much once I leave.”
Jessica Stolee, a doctoral student in GW's Department of Chemistry, was awarded the Chorafas prize last year, and electrical engineering doctoral student Shutao Wang won in 2012.