CREST adds two new Faculty in 2011

Posted on February 24, 2011

 

Professor Kyle McDonald

Has officially joined The City University of New York in February 2011. Professor McDonald is appointed Professor in the Division of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at The City College of New York. Prior to joining CUNY and CREST Institute, he was a Principal Scientist in the Water and Carbon Cycles Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, California. Prof. McDonald had been employed in JPL’s, Science Division since 1991. He specializes in microwave remote sensing of terrestrial ecosystems. Prof. McDonald has been a Principal and Co-Investigator on numerous NASA Earth Science investigations. He currently leads a NASA project focused on assembly of a global-scale data record of inundated wetlands. He received the Bachelor of Electrical Engineering degree (co-operative plan with highest honors) from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia in 1983, the M. S. degree in numerical science from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland in 1985, and the M. S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from The University of Michigan, Ann, Arbor, Michigan in 1986 and 1991, respectively.. His research interests have primarily involved the application of microwave remote sensing techniques for monitoring seasonal dynamics in boreal ecosystems, as related to ecological and hydrological processes and the global carbon and water cycles. Prof. McDonald has been a Principal and Co-Investigator on numerous NASA Earth Science investigations. He is a member of NASA's North American Carbon Program (NACP) science team, NSF's Pan-Arctic Community-wide Hydrological Analysis and Monitoring Program (Arctic-CHAMP) Science Steering Committee, and the ALOS PALSAR Kyoto & Carbon Initiative science panel. He has been a member of the NASA BOREAS and BOREAS Follow-on science teams, the NASA Scatterometer instrument team, the NASA Ocean Vector Winds Science Team, and the NASA Cold Land Processes (CLP) Steering Committee. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.

Dr. Michael Piasecki

Has joined The City University of New York in January 2011. He holds the rank of associate professor at City College of New York in New York City in the Department of Civil Engineering. He will bring many years of research and educational experiences to CREST Institute and CUNY Environmental Cross Road Initiative . Dr. Piasecki’s research interest centers on the area of hydroinformatics and focuses on the development of metadata profiles for the hydrologic community as well the creation and representation of hydrologic processes and vocabularies using ontologies. Of special interest is the problem of semantic heterogeneity in the description of processes and data files and the utilization of ontologies to overcome these heterogeneities. Michael Piasecki holds degrees in civil engineering from the University of Hanover, Germany (Diplom, 1991), and the University of Michigan (Ph.D., 1994) with a focus on water resources engineering. Piasecki has been a member of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI), Hydrologic Information Systems team developing a prototype information system of the hydrologic community, where he has taken the lead on developing a global search engine, semantic mediation approaches, metadata development, and controlled vocabularies for use in the information system. He is also the recipient of a number of other cyberinfrastructure (CI) development projects addressing CI and education as well as CI test bed grants. As part of his community involvement and recognition for his expertise, he is a member of the CI advisory committee for the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) network; has been invited to numerous workshops on CI development organized by the environmental observing system communities and the U.S. National Science Foundation; and serves as associate editor for the Computers and GeoSciences, HydroInformatics, and Earth System Informatics Journals covering the area of hydroinformatics and hydrologic information sciences.