Dr. Serkan Girgin has established and is currently leading the activities of the Center of Expertise in Big Geodata (CRIB) at ITC, which is an overarching facility collecting, developing, and sharing operational know-how on the geospatial big data technologies. He performs research on big data, cloud computing, and research data management technologies, and provides advice and consultancy on adoption of these technologies for education, research, and capacity development activities. He is also an expert on the design and development of geocomputing platforms, GIS and RS applications, environmental information systems, and large-scale web applications. He has designed and developed ITC's Geospatial Computing Platform, and European Commission's Natech Database (eNatech) and Rapid Natech Risk Assessment and Mapping System (RAPID-N). He has M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Environmental Engineering, a second M.Sc. degree in Geodetic and Geographic Information Technologies, and more than two decades of research and consultancy experience in academic, private, and scientific organizations since 1996. He is an eScience Center Fellow and SURF Research Support Champion in the Netherlands in 2022.

On-Going

• ESA EO AFRICA Research and Development Facility (funded by ESA) (Contributor)
• Next Generation Research Data Repositories: Bringing Computation to Data for Exploratory Data Analysis and Visualisation (funded by SURF) (Principal Investigator)
• GEOnnect: Connecting eScience Center RSEs and ITC researchers for better environment and sustainability-related research software uptake and development (funded by the Netherlands eScience Centre) (Principal Investigator)
• GEO Citizen Science and Pre-University: building a bridge between school education and digital technology for geo citizen science (funded by ITC) (Principal Investigator)
• IDEAMAPS Network (funded by Melinda-Gates Foundation) (Contributor)
• HyRELIEF: Enhancing ECOSTRESS drought monitoring with hyperspectral narrowbands (fundedn by ESA) (Contributor)
• Open SAR Library (funded by ESA) (Contributor)
• EcoExtreML: Accelerating process understanding for ecosystem functioning under extreme climates with physics-aware machine learning (funded by Netherlands eScience Centre) (Contributor)

Completed

• JupyterFAIR: Integration of interactive research environments to data repositories to facilitate FAIR data management practice (2022) (Principal Investigator)
• TMT+ Bangladesh: Open-source scientific computing for agrogeospatial big data analysis (2021-2022) (Contributor)
• IDeAMapSudan: Integrated Deprivation Area Mapping System for Displacement Durable Solutions and socioeconomic reconstruction in Khartoum, Sudan (2021-2022) (Contributor)
• FAO State of the Food and Agriculture (SOFA) Phase II (2021) (Contributor)
• University-wide Prototype Interactive Computing Platform (2021) (Contributor)
• FAO State of the Food and Agriculture (SOFA) Phase I (2020) (Contributor)
• IDEMAPS Modelling Platform (2020-2021) (Contributor)
• Digital Earth Africa Capacity Development Strategy (2020-2021) (Contributor)
• ITC - eScience Centre Phenology Alliance (2020) (Contributor)