Zhe Zhu

Director of GERS Laboratory

Natural Resources and the Environment

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment, the Founding Director of the Global Environmental Remote Sensing (GERS) Laboratory. I am the recipient of the 2021 UConn-AAUP Excellence Awards, the Web of Science Highly Cited Researchers (2020-2023), LP DAAC User Working Group, a member of the USGS-NASA Landsat Science Team (2018-2023), NASA Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) Science Team, and NASA Black Marble Science Team, and the author of the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCAS) on Land Cover and Land-Use Change for U.S. Global Change Research Program. I am also the Associate Editor and Special Editor of Remote Sensing of Environment and Science of Remote Sensing. 

My research has been focused on developing novel numerical, statistical, and computational approaches that integrate satellite data and in-situ measurements for studying the coupled human-environment systems and environmental change at multiple spatiotemporal scales, with particular emphasis on large-scale (e.g., national, and global) and dense time series (e.g., weekly, or subweekly satellite observations) analyses. I have been the PI or Institutional PI for 4.4 million research grants and participated in a total of 27 million research grants. My projects are mainly supported by government funding agencies, such as USGS, NASA, NSF, USDA, IARPA, DEEP, as well as by the private sector, such as The Climate Corporation, Eversource Energy, and PCI Geomatics Corporate.

In my spare time, I like fishing, hiking, and playing basketball.