Leland Pierce honored as outstanding student organization advisor

Dr. Leland Pierce has been awarded the Outstanding Student Organization Advisor Award from the College of Engineering for his service as advisor to the U-M student chapter of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS). He’s served as their webmaster for the past five years, and he helps connect students to local employers related to GRSS research themes and the research areas of the students.

“The student members are very enthusiastic and hard-working,” Pierce says. “I am happy to help them with their efforts to broaden their education and to hold events that help them get to know each other while connecting with other leaders in the field.”

GRSS is a worldwide premier remote sensing professional organization with more 4,000 members throughout the globe. The fields of interest of GRSS are the theory, concepts, and techniques of science and engineering as they apply to the remote sensing of the earth, oceans, atmosphere, and space, as well as the processing, interpretation and dissemination of this information.

The U-M chapter of GRSS was established September 5, 2018. It serves as a focal point for graduate and undergraduate students with an interest in geoscience and remote sensing. The chapter seeks to foster inter-department and interdisciplinary interaction within the university community and facilitate engagement with the broader IEEE GRSS community.

Pierce is an Associate Research Scientist whose research interests include: development of image processing techniques for radar remote sensing; scattering models for natural targets; integration of Geographical Information Systems (GIS); inverse scattering problems and image classification; and applied Computational electromagnetics.

Pierce is president of the Southeastern Michigan Chapter of IEEE GRSS, and an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing. He also teaches introductory courses in electrical and computer engineering. He received his BSE, MSE and PHD degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan.