Mariana Belgiu received a MSc in Applied Geoinformatics from the University of Salzburg, Austria in 2009 and a PhD in Remote Sensing in 2014 from the same university. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Twente, Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), The Netherlands. Her research activities are dedicated to implementing innovative methods for turning vast amount of optical remote sensing data into useful information for different purposes such as urban areas and cropland areas mappings. More specific, here main current research interest deals with the design, testing, and implementation of efficient methods to classify multi-temporal and single-date satellite images and with the transferability of supervised classification methods across different geographic areas.

She is one of the co-editors of a special issue of the ‘Cartography and Geographic Information Science’ journal and of a special issue of the ‘Sensors’ journal dedicated to ‘Remote Sensing Image Processing and Analysis’. She is a member of the Advisory Board of ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, the second highest standing journal in the field of Remote Sensing (impact factor 5.994). She is a member of several commissions of trusts and scientific societies (e.g. scientific committee/review board of the GI_Forum, Joint Urban Remote Sensing Event (JURSE) and Symposium of ISPRS Technical Commission IV conferences, member of several ISPRS working groups, a panel member of the Belgian national remote sensing research programme STEREO III etc.). She was granted several awards including the ESRI Young Scholar or Copernicus Masters - Big Data Challenge award received in recognition of ground-breaking research on novel methods for remote sensing data retrieval and analysis.