Maria Piles is 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, and has been actively involved within the scientific activities of the ESA’s SMOS and the NASA’s SMAP missions. She is now a member of CIMR Mission Advisory Group. 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. Since 2015, she is serving as president of the Spanish chapter of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society.