Prof. El-Askary received his Ph.D. in Computational Sciences and Informatics from George Mason University in 2004. He is the 2015 recipient of the Chapman University's elite Senior Wang-Fradkin Professorship award. In 2016, he was named as the regional coordinator on a $3 million Euro grant from the European Union’s (EU) Horizon 2020. The three year project, known as GEO-CRADLE, deals with Coordinating and integrating state-of-the-art Earth Observation Activities in the regions of North Africa, Middle East and Balkans and Developing Links with GEO related initiatives toward GEOSS. Through this work he with the research team were able to deliver the first analytical solar Atlas of Egypt that is now considered to be the official document of the government for solar investment. This work was recently presented at Planet Earth Institute at the Royal Society in London during a seminar that discussed the future of solar energy in Africa. His research interests include dust storms monitoring and detection using different remote sensing technologies as well as studying other extreme events. He is also involved in studying air pollution problems over mega cities due to natural and man-made effects as well as climate change and its impacts on sea level rise and coral reefs for coastal areas. His research also included using earth observations in studying impact of sever dust storms anomalous chlorophyll outbreaks in the marine environment, hurricanes intensification as well as transport of microbes’ causing Kawasaki disease outbreaks. Recently Prof. El-Askary has been focusing on using earth observations for water resources management, precision agriculture along the sustainable development goals. Today Prof. El-Askary views himself as an Earth System Scientist with a major interest in natural hazards, atmospheric events and using renewable energy as the only way to address global climate change issues. Prof. El-Askary has published over a 100 refereed research publications, conferences full paper and book chapters in these research areas. Dr. El-Askary’s research has been supported by National Science Foundation, NASA, United States Department of Agriculture and European Union. Dr. El-Askary has received the Saudi Arabia award hosted by the Arab Administrative Development Organization (ARADO) affiliated with the League of Arab states for the best published article in Environmental Management among 150 articles in 2006. He is also member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), AGU, EGU, COSPAR, and Phi Beta Delta Honor Society.
Dr. Essam Heggy is a Research Scientist at the Microwave Systems, Sensors and Imaging Lab (MiXIL), at the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California and affiliate of the Rosetta project at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Heggy obtained both his MSc. and Ph.D. respectively in 1999 and 2002 with distinguished honors from the ParisVI University in France (UPMC-Sorbonne). His research focuses on understanding water evolution in Earth’s arid environments as well as planetary surfaces using radar surface and subsurface characterization methods. His research particularly focuses on understanding volatile evolution in the North African Sahara and Arabian Peninsula, as well as Mars, the Moon, Jovian Icy satellites and Near-Earth Objects. His work involves probing structural, hydrological and volcanic elements in terrestrial and planetary environments using different types of radar imaging and sounding techniques as well as measuring the electromagnetic properties of rocks in the radar frequency range. He is currently a member of the science team of the MARSIS instrument aboard the Mars Express orbiter (2003-present), the Mini-SAR experiment aboard Chandrayaan-1, the Mini-RF experiment on board the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (2008-present), the CONSERT radar experiment aboard the Rosetta mission (2004-present) and the WISDOM GPR onboard ExoMars 2020 Rover (2008 to Present). He also edited a special JGR-Planets (AGU) volume on terrestrial and planetary radars. He is on the founding editorial board of the Journal of Arctic Geoscience ARKTOS (Springer), Geosciences (MDPI), National Geographic and co-chaired several sessions in international conferences and workshops on terrestrial and planetary radar subsurface imaging including AGU, LPSC and IEEE meetings.
Prof. Pradhan received the B.Sc. degree with honors from Berhampur University (India), the M.Sc. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Bombay (India), and the M.Tech. degree in Civil Engineering from the IIT in Kanpur (India) and Dresden University of Technology (Germany). He received the Ph.D. degree in GIS and Geomatics Engineering from the University Putra Malaysia. From 2008 to 2010 he was a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship from Germany. In 2011,h
