Prof. Dr. Irena Hajnsek
Prof. Dr. Irena Hajnsek
Full Professor at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering
Additional information
Irena Hajnsek is since November 2009 Professor of Earth Observation at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zürich Institute of Environmental Engineering and at the same time head of the Polarimetric SAR Interferometry research group at the German Aerospace Center Microwaves and Radar Institute. Her main research interests are in electromagnetic propagation and scattering theory, radar polarimetry, SAR and interferometric SAR data processing techniques, environmental parameter modelling and estimation. She received her Dipl. degree in the topic of fluvial river systems (Honors) in 1996 from the Free University of Berlin, Germany and the Dr. rer. nat. degree (Honors) in model-based estimation of soil moisture from fully polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar in 2001 from the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Germany. Since 2010 she is the science coordinator of the German satellite mission TanDEM-X.
Currently she is a member of the European Space Agency Mission Advisory Group for the ROSE-L Mission. She was Technical Program Co-chair of the IEEE IGARSS 2012 in Munich, Germany and 2019 in Yokohama, Japan. From 2013 to 2021 she was a member of the IEEE GRSS AdCom and from 2016 to 2020 the vice president of the IEEE GRSS Technical Committees. She is the founder of the new Technical Committee Remote sensing Environment, Analysis and Climate Technologies (REACT) that exists since Nov 2021.
She won 10 highly recognised awards, among them five best paper awards (VDE EUSAR 2018, VDE EUSAR 2008, IEEE Transactions Geoscience and Remote Sensing 2008, ESA POLinSAR Wolfgang Boerner Award 2019, IEEE GRSS J-STARS Prize Paper Award 2019), three very prestigious awards in recognition of the scientific work done in the last five years (DLR Wissenschaftpreis, IEEE W.R.G. Baker Paper Award and DLR Senior Scientist), certificate in recognition to the achievements in the design and execution of a German satellite mission TanDEM-X and she have been awarded as a IEEE Fellow (2014) for her innovative research work in remote sensing. Further she serves as an Associate Editor of IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing (USA).
Honours
| Year | Distinction |
|---|---|
| 2023 | Best Poster Award at the IEEE GRSS IADF School for the Poster Entitled N.Basargin, A. Alonso-Gonzalez and I. Hajnsek “Constrained Tensor Decomposition for Multidimensional SAR Data” |
| 2023 | Certificate of Appreciation for the lead of the IEEE GRSS Technical Committee Remote Sensing Environment, Analysis and Climate Technology (REACT) |
| 2020 | 2013 - 2020 IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society – Member Certification of the appreciation for serving at the Administrative Committee |
| 2019 | Certificate of Appreciation for the organization of the technical program of IGARSS 2019 Yokohama, Japan IEEE Geoscience and Remote IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing |
| 2019 | ESA Polinsar Prof. Wolfgang Boerner Student Award for the best paper presentation entitled, Emmanuel Hecht, Alberto Alonso-Gonzalez, Kostas Papathanassiou und Irena Hajnsek “Towards The Estimation Of Soil Parameters Under Agricultural Vegetation By Means Of PolInSAR Measurements” |
| 2019 | IEEE – Prize Paper Award GRSS J-STARS H. Joerg, M. Pardini, I. Hajnsek and K. P. Papathanassiou, "Sensitivity of SAR Tomography to the Phenological Cycle of Agricultural Crops at X-, C-, and L-band," in IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, vol. 11, no. 9, pp. 3014-3029, Sept. 2018, doi: 10.1109/JSTARS.2018.2845127. |
| 2018 | Best-Paper-Award (VDE EUSAR) Georg Fischer, Matteo Pardini, Giuseppe Parrella, Kostas Papathanassiou und Irena Hajnsek, “Cancellation of Dominant Scattering Layers in Greenland's Subsurface for the Characterization of Ice Volumes" mit einem von drei Best Student Paper Awards der European Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar (EUSAR 2018) in Aachen” |
| 2014 | DLR-Wissenschaftspreis T. Jadghuber, Irena Hajnsek; Axel Bronstert; Konstantinos Panagiotis Papathanassiou, Soil Moisture Estimation Under Low Vegetation Cover Using a Multi-Angular Polarimetric Decomposition |
| 2014 | IEEE Fellow for contribution of synthetic aperture radar imaging using airborne sensors and satellite missions. |
| 2012 | Certificate of Recognition of TanDEM-X Achievements and Impact during the EUSAR conference. |
| 2012 | Certificate of Recognition of TanDEM-X Achievements and Impact, EUSAR |
| 2012 | DLR Senior Researcher Award for the lead of the Pol-InSAR research group and research excellence. |
| 2012 | IEEE W.R.G Baker Paper Award for paper entitled, Dr. Gerhard Krieger, Prof. Alberto Moreira, Dr. Hauke Fiedler (ehemals HR), Prof. Irena Hajnsek, Marian Werner, Dr. Marwan Younis und Dr. Manfred Zink. TanDEM-X: A Satellite Formation for High-Resolution SAR Interferometry” |
| 2008 | Best Student Paper award from Jayanti J. Sharma Irena Hajnsek and Konstantinos Papathanassiou "For a very significant contribution to the field of Synthetic Aperture Radar entitled": "Long-wavelength Pol-InSAR for glacier ice extinction estimation" Conference Paper Award EUSAR 2008, Friedrichshafen, Deutschland |
| 2008 | Co-Author IEEE Transactions GRSs Prize Paper Award G. Krieger et al., "TanDEM-X: A Satellite Formation for High-Resolution SAR Interferometry," in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, vol. 45, no. 11, pp. 3317-3341, Nov. 2007, doi: 10.1109/TGRS.2007.900693. |
| 2003 | Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR) Wissenschaftspreis des Jahres |
| 2001 | Friedrich-Schiller- Universität, Jena, Deutschland Auszeichnung für ihre Dissertation |
Course Catalogue
Spring Semester 2025
| Number | Unit |
|---|---|
| 101-0522-10L | Doctoral Seminar Data Science and Machine Learning in Civil, Env. and Geospatial Engineering |
| 101-0523-15L | Frontiers in Machine Learning Applied to Civil, Env. and Geospatial Engineering |
| 102-0510-00L | Introduction to Environmental Monitoring |
| 102-0617-01L | Methodologies for Image Processing of Remote Sensing Data |
| 102-0675-AAL | Earth Observation |