Jeffrey Walker is an Australian Research Council Laureate Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Monash University. He is undertaking research on soil moisture remote sensing and data assimilation, including development of the only Australian airborne capability for simulating new satellite missions for soil moisture. He is contributing to soil moisture satellite missions at both NASA and ESA, as a Science Definition Team member for the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission and Cal/val Team member for the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission respectively.

Professor Jeffrey Walker received his BEng(Civil) and BSurv degrees in 1996 with Hons 1 and University Medal from the University of Newcastle, Australia, and received his PhD in Water Resources Engineering from the same University in 2000. His PhD thesis was among the early pioneering research on estimation of root-zone soil moisture from remotely sensed surface soil moisture observations. He then joined NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre to implement his soil moisture work globally. In 2001 he moved to the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Melbourne as Lecturer, where he continued his soil moisture work, including development of the only Australian airborne capability for simulating new satellite missions for soil moisture. In 2010 he was appointed as Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Monash University where he is continuing this research.

His primary research ambition is to lead programs in socially relevant research that will have a positive impact on the way we take care of the environment so as to result in an improved quality of life both now and in the generations to come. He believes that the key to this is through improved earth system state and flux monitoring, prediction and reporting, in a way that is relevant to policy and decision making processes, flood and drought prediction and assessment, land and water management, national weather and climate forecasting, etc. His vision is that this goal will be realised through a combination of i) environmental sensing, ii) earth system modelling, and iii) optimal convergence of model predictions with observations through data assimilation. This is a new area of research that has gained wide spread interest over the past years.

Prof. Sen Jia Shenzhen University, China IEEE Senior Member Ministry of Education National Young Talent Guangdong Outstanding Young Teachers Training Program Associate Dean, School of Computer and Software, Shenzhen University Shenzhen High-level Talents and Shenzhen Nanshan District “Pilot Talents” Special Support Program for Cultivating High-level Talents in Guangdong Province

Prof. Sen Jia, Distinguished Professor of Shenzhen University, Doctoral Supervisor, National Young Talent of Ministry of Education. He is mainly engaged in the research and development of artificial intelligence, machine learning and remote sensing information processing. He has presided over four National Natural Science Foundation of China projects and several provincial and ministerial projects, and has published more than 100 scientific papers, including more than 40 papers in international authoritative journals, such as IEEE TGRS, IEEE TNNLS, ISPRS, etc. He has been selected as a member of the “Special Support Program of Guangdong” and the “Outstanding Young Teachers Training Program of Guangdong Province”, and has been selected as a member of the “Outstanding Young Teachers Training Program of Guangdong Province”. He has been selected for the “Guangdong Special Support Program” and “Guangdong Outstanding Young Teachers Cultivation Program”, and selected as one of the Shenzhen High-level Talents and Shenzhen Nanshan District “Pilot Talents”. He has been awarded the Second Prize of Natural Science in Guangdong Province (ranked first), and the Second Prize of Natural Science in Shenzhen City (ranked second), and has been a senior member of IEEE. He is a senior member of IEEE, and serves as an editorial board member of IEEE TGRS, an international authoritative journal in remote sensing (Associate Editor, IF=8.13, CAS Region I); he has been awarded 16 invention patents (including 6 domestic invention patents, 2 U.S. patents, and 8 international invention patents under PCT).