IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2019 - 51

Department, Microwaves and Radar Institute, as a research
scientist, after a visiting research period from August to
December 2009. In 2017, he was visiting scientist at the
Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, United States. His main research interests are SAR
tomographic and polarimetric interferometric processing
for 3D bio/geophysical information extraction over natural
volumes (forest, agriculture, ice), SAR mission design, and
SAR mission performance analysis.
Hajnsek received her Dipl. degree from the Free University of Berlin in 1996 and her doctoral degree from the
Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Germany, in 2001.
She is currently a professor of Earth observation at the ETH
Zurich Institute of Environmental Engineering and head of
the Polarimetric SAR Interferometry Research Group at the
Microwaves and Radar Institute. Her main research interests are electromagnetic propagation and scattering theory,
radar polarimetry, SAR and interferometric SAR data processing techniques, and environmental parameter modeling and estimation. Since 2010, she has been the science
coordinator of the German satellite mission TanDEM-X.
Hajnsek was technical program cochair of IGARSS 2012 in
Munich. Since 2013, she has been a member of the IEEE
GRSS AdCom and, since 2016, vice president of IEEE GRSS
technical committees.
Papathanassiou received his Dipl. Ing. and doctoral
degrees from the Technical University of Graz, Austria, in
1994 and 1999, respectively. From 1992 to 1994, he was
with the Institute for Digital Image Processing, Joanneum
Research, Graz. Between 1995 and 1999, he worked at the
Microwaves and Radar Institute. From 1999 to 2000, he
was a European Union postdoctoral fellow with Applied
Electromagnetics, St. Andrews, United Kingdom. He has
been with the Microwaves and Radar Institute since October 2000, currently as a senior scientist leading the Information Retrieval Research Group. His main research interests are in polarimetric and interferometric processing and
calibration techniques, polarimetric SAR interferometry,
quantitative parameter estimation from SAR data, SAR
mission design, and SAR mission performance analysis.
He is member of DLR's TanDEM-X and TanDEM-L science
teams, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)
Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2 calibration and
validation teams, the European Space Agency's Biomass
Mission Advisory Group, the Argentine Microwaves Observation Satellite Communications Expert team, JAXA's
Carbon and Kyoto Initiative, and NASA's Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation Lidar Mission Science team.
Papathanassiou received the IGARSS Prize Paper Award in
1998, the Best Paper Award of the European SAR Conference in 2002, and the DLR Science Award in 2002. In 2011,
he received the DLR's Senior Scientist Award.

scientific paper in a GRSS journal in the past five years
that has received the highest number of citations and impact, as measured collectively by the Thomson Reuters
Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar citation indices.
A previously selected paper shall not be eligible for this
award in future years. The award consists of a certificate
and an honorarium of US$3,000, equally divided among
the authors.
The 2019 IEEE GRSS Highest Impact Paper Award was
presented for the paper "Deep Learning-Based Classification of Hyperspectral Data," published in J-STARS (vol.
7, no. 6, pp. 2094-2107, June 2014). It was coauthored by
Yushi Chen (Figure 4), Zhouhan Lin, Xing Zhao, Gang
Wang, and Yanfeng Gu.
Chen received his Ph.D. degree from the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), China, in 2008 and is currently a professor in the School of Electrical and Information Engineering at HIT. He has published a number
of papers and is the inventor or coinventor of three patents. His research interests include hyperspectral data

IEEE GRSS HIGHEST IMPACT PAPER AWARD
The GRSS established the IEEE GRSS Highest Impact
Paper Award to recognize authors who have published a

FIGURE 4. 2019 IEEE GRSS Highest Impact Paper Award recipient

DECEMBER 2019

IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING MAGAZINE

FIGURE 3. 2019 IEEE GRSS J-STARS Prize Paper Award recipient
Irena Hajnsek (right) with GRSS President Paolo Gamba.

Yushi Chen (center) with GRSS President Paolo Gamba (right) and
Antonio Plaza, chair of the GRSS Publications Awards Committee.
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IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2019