Fitxa persona

Maria Piles is Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Senior Researcher at the Image Processing Laboratory, Universitat de València. She is a Telecommunication Engineer, and has a Ph.D. in signal theory and communications (2010), mastering in remote sensing. She has wide experience in the retrieval of the water content in soils and vegetation from low-frequency microwaves. She is actively involved in the scientific activities of the ESA's SMOS and NASA's SMAP missions and the preparatory activities for the Copernicus Imaging Microwave Radiometer (CIMR) Sentinel Expansion mission. Her research interests include microwave remote sensing, estimation of soil moisture and vegetation biogeophysical parameters, and the development of multi-sensor techniques for enhanced retrievals with focus on agriculture, forestry, wildfire prediction, extreme detection, and climate studies. She is also currently engaged in research projects that use machine learning to exploit Earth Observation data, focusing on developing data-driven models that respect physical laws, causal inference, and learning and explaining feature representations. She teaches courses in signal theory, image processing, and remote sensing in several engineering and data science degrees. She is an IEEE Senior Member (2019), former president of the IEEE Spain Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society chapter (GRSS), and ELLIS fellow (2021).