Dr. Elif Sertel is Director of Remote Sensing at the Societal Computing and Innovation Lab at UC San Diego. She is Professor Emerita of Geomatics Engineering at Istanbul Technical University. Her research spans satellite, aerial and UAV sensing, GeoAI and geospatial decision-support systems for environmental challenges such as wildfires, droughts, earthquakes and floods. Before joining UC San Diego, she was a visiting researcher at UCLA and spent more than two decades at Istanbul Technical University, where she served as a professor and directed the ITU Center for Satellite Communications and Remote Sensing. She earned her PhD in Geomatics Engineering from Istanbul Technical University, having conducted her doctoral research at Rutgers University as a Fulbright Scholar, and is an IEEE Senior Member.
