Dr. Ramesh Shrestha Retiring
Dr. Ramesh Shrestha will retire in January 2021 after 35 years in academia – the last 17 as Director of the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping. Ramesh has had an immeasurable impact on the applications of lidar to both science and education. NCALM has acquired airborne data for hundreds of projects all over the globe, enabling the research of hundreds of investigators, under his leadership. Ramesh was also instrumental in the establishment of a graduate program in Geosensing Systems Engineering & Sciences at the University of Houston. A letter of farewell to the community from Ramesh can be found here.
Despite the retirement of our founding director, mentor, and friend, the NCALM team, now led by Craig Glennie, aims for a continued improvement of the service we provide to the broad research community, with a range of sensor and platform options and community initiatives, such as cost-distributed campaigns for Mesoamerica and Alaska. Seed proposals are currently being solicited for 2020 (ncalm.cive.uh.edu/news/ncalm-invites-graduate-students-submit-2020-seed-proposals), with a deadline of December 31, and NCALM has released a community expression of interest for projects in Alaska for Summer 2021 (ncalm.cive.uh.edu/news/call-expressions-interest-alaska-airborne-lidar-campaign). Anyone interested in airborne or remotely piloted system (sUAS) lidar for their projects should contact the new Director of NCALM at clglennie [at] uh.edu (clglennie[at]uh[dot]edu).