Dr. Melba Crawford will serve as the Interim Head of the School of Civil Engineering.  Her appointment will be effective January 2, 2012.  Dr. Crawford will continue her responsibilities as the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Engineering.

Melba Crawford is a Professor of Civil Engineering and Agronomy, where she is Director of the Laboratory for Applications of Remote Sensing and the Chair of Excellence in Earth Observation.  She also serves as the Associate Dean for Research of the College of Engineering.  Previously, she was a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin, where she founded an interdisciplinary research and applications development program in space-based and airborne remote sensing.  Dr. Crawford received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana, and the Ph.D. degree in Systems Engineering from Ohio State University, Columbus.

In 2004-2005, Dr. Crawford was a Jefferson Senior Science Fellow at the U.S. Department of State and continues to serve in an advisory capacity.  She is a Fellow of the IEEE, Executive Vice President of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society, and an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.  Dr. Crawford was a member of the NASA Earth System Science and Applications Advisory Committee, the NASA EO-1 Science Validation team, and the advisory committee to the NASA Socioeconomic Applications and Data Center at Columbia University.  She currently heads an advisory committee for the IEEE Committee on Earth Observation to the South African Department of Science and Technology for capacity building in space technologies and remote sensing applications.