Elizabeth M. Middleton NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Winner of the 2012 Nordberg Award

 
"Advancing Study of Ecosystems from Space with Spectroscopy"


Dr. Middleton will present aspects of remote sensing studies of vegetation conducted by the Laboratory for Biospheric Sciences (Code 618), with emphasis on current topics and her research on spectral measurements of plant health and physiological status, spanning laboratory, in situ "ground truth", and satellite observations.

Biographical Information

Elizabeth M. Middleton is a Senior Scientist with the Laboratory for Biospheric Sciences (Code 618) at NASA/GSFC, Greenbelt, MD.  She has been a NASA employee in the Earth Sciences Directorate since 1978 and is currently the Mission Scientist for the Earth Exploring One (EO-1) satellite, now in its twelfth year in orbit.  She is also the GSFC lead for the NASA Hyperspectral Infrared Imager (HyspIRI), a Decadal Survey satellite concept in development. 

Dr. Middleton recently received a Career Achievement Award from the Hydrospheric and Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at GSFC in 2011.  She also received NASA Group Achievement Awards in 1983, 1994, 1995 and 2003, respectively, in addition to numerous Performance Awards.

Dr. Middleton’s research is focused on interactions of vegetation and light, including UV-B impacts, fluorescence, plant pigments, and bidirectional reflectance properties of plant canopies.  For the past decade, she has led a research team that conducts satellite, in situ field and laboratory studies of vegetation spectral bio-indicators of plant stress and photosynthetic function, including plant fluorescence.  She has ~120 scientific and technical publications.

She is currently serving for a second time as the Outside Observer on the Mission Advisory Group (2007-2009, 2011+) for the FLuorescence Explorer (FLEX), an European Space Agency’s Explorer 8 Phase satellite mission concept. 

She was a Principal Investigator in the Boreal Ecosystem-Atmosphere Study (BOREAS) conducted in Canada (1993-1996) and a Co-Investigator in the FIFE grassland study in Kansas (1983-1989).  She served as Deputy Project Leader (1996-1998) for the NASA-led Amazon study in Brazil, was a member of the GSFC Carbon Cycle Science Working Group (2000-2007), and served as the NASA representative to the US Federal Geographic Data Committee’s Vegetation Subcommittee for many years. 

She is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Applied Remote Sensing and presently is the Guest Editor of a Special Issue on EO-1 sponsored by IEEE’s Journal of Special Topics in Applied Remote Sensing (JSTARS).  She received a B.S. degree in Zoology from the University of Maryland (1967), a M.S. degree in Ecology from the University of Maryland (1976), and a Ph.D. degree in Botany from the University of Maryland (1993) where her dissertation topic was “Evaluating the effects of UV-B and UV-A radiation on plant pigments, photosynthesis, and growth in Glycine max L.”

Return to Schedule