Woman Scientist of the Month
We are pleased to announce that our colleague Irena Hajnsek (Microwaves and Radar Institute) has been awarded "DLRWS+ Woman Scientist of the Month: September 2024" by the DLR Women Scientist's Network. Congratulations to her!
Irena Hajnsek has successfully headed the Polarimetric SAR Interferometry (Pol-InSAR) group at the Microwaves and Radar Institute (HR) at DLR since 2001. The idea for the development of polarimetric SAR interferometry was born at the HR Institute and it was only with the founding of the research group that it gained a globally recognized and leading position in the scientific work on the analysis of its potential and the validation of different methods.
Since 2009, she has been Professor of Earth Observation and Radar Remote Sensing at the Institute of Environmental Engineering at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and is involved in teaching and research. She gives a main lecture on earth observation in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering and leads a research group using innovative multi-modal radar imaging modes to derive environmental parameters.
Her scientific focus is on the development of bio/geo-physical inversion models for the determination of environmental parameters from multi-parameter SAR data. She started her work with the development of inversion models for the determination of near-surface soil moisture from polarimetric SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar). To this end, she developed a fully polarimetric coherent model for inversion, which is still unique today. There are now several modifications of this model in the literature. The main problem here is that most surface scattering models only work well on non-vegetated soil and reduce their range of validity if vegetation exists. She is still working intensively on this scientific problem, soil moisture determination under a vegetation stand, and there are already first successful approaches and methods to solve this with electromagnetic models using multi-parameter SAR data. Over the years, she has expanded her focus to include a variety of topics in the hydrosphere, biosphere and cryosphere.
To demonstrate and verify the developed algorithms, airborne (DLR's F-SAR) and ground-based (ETH's KAPRI) radar data collected during experimental campaigns are used. Irena Hajnsek has conducted many of these campaigns worldwide (Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Greenland, Indonesia, Gabon, Canada, etc.) and used these data to extend and verify her algorithms.
Since 2010 she has been the scientific coordinator of the German radar mission TanDEM-X and was involved in the conception of satellite missions. Since then, she has been involved in various radar satellite concepts (Tandem-L, CoReH2O, SKADI, Rose-L) and works as a consultant at the European Space Agency.
Her expertise is recognized in international scientific circles and has led to her being a regular reviewer for international organizations, an Associated Editor of IEEE journals and being consulted in European committees of ESA and international UN organizations.
Young women researchers are particularly important to her, which is why she is intensively involved as a mentor in the Helmholtz Association, the Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society of IEEE and ETH.
Irena will be awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Oslo in September 2024 and is this month's DLRWS+ Scientist.
About the DLR Women Scientists' Network (DLRWS)
In February 2022, "DLR Women+ in Science & Technology" was founded upon the initiative of two DLR women scientists. The aims of the network are to increase the proportion of women and gender minorities (women+) at DLR, to make women+ experts visible, promote them for scientific conferences and, as the voice of DLR’s women+ scientists, to work out the levers at DLR so that DLR is seen as an attractive employer, especially for women and gender minorities. Today, more than 450 employees have already joined the network.