Biography
Mariko Bürgin was born in Altdorf, Switzerland. She received the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland, in 2008. She joined Mahta Moghaddam’s group in 2009 at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and received the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA, in 2011. Following the group’s transition in January 2012, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA, while working remotely on her Ph.D. She received her doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering from the Radiation Laboratory of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in December 2013. In 2014, she joined the Water and Carbon Cycles Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA, as a Caltech Postdoctoral Scholar.
Her research interests include forward and inverse modeling of electromagnetic scattering from vegetated areas with special interest in forests, radar systems, and radar measurements of vegetation and ground variables such as soil moisture. Her current research work is concerned with electromagnetic modeling for remote sensing applications, especially soil moisture remote sensing. Her current focus is on the improvement of the retrieval of soil moisture based on active microwave remote sensing over vegetated/forested areas by addressing important but often neglected aspects in radar imaging such as ionospheric effects, effects of multi species vegetation (heterogeneity at pixel level) and heterogeneity at landscape level. Her work is directly related to NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) and the Airborne Microwave Observatory of Subcanopy and Subsurface (AirMOSS) mission.
Mariko has regularly participated in many field campaigns, from ground truth collection (CanEx10 in Saskatchewan, Canada, SMAPEx3 in Yanco, Australia, SMAPVEX12 in Manitoba, Canada and many AirMOSS related field work in Arizona, Oregon, USA etc.) to wireless sensor node deployments as part of the Soil moisture Sensing Controller And oPtimal Estimator (SoilSCAPE) project.
Mariko is a member of IEEE, IEEE-GRSS and AGU.
