James L Garrison is a Professor in the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Purdue University, with courtesy appointments in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Environmental and Ecological Engineering. He is also a faculty affiliate in the Interdisciplinary Graduate program in Environmental and Ecological Science and Engineering. He has supervised 10 doctoral theses and 13 Master’s theses. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Navigation (ION).

Prof. Garrison has 39 articles in peer-reviewed journals, 62 conference proceedings and 7 U.S. Patents. In January 2018, he became the Editor in Chief of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine.

Prof. Garrison had a 12-year career with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) prior to joining the Purdue faculty. He earned a PhD from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1997, a BS from the Rensselaer Polytechnic and an MS from Stanford University.

Prof. Garrison’s research interests include Earth remote sensing using Global Navigation Satellite Systems Reflectometry (GNSS-R) and signals of opportunity. He made the first airborne experimental measurements demonstrating a change in the cross-correlation function of reflected GNSS signals corresponding to the sea roughness. These early experiments laid the foundation for the NASA CYGNSS constellation, launched in December 2016 to provide high revisit rate observations of tropical cyclone development. He continues to work with NASA and NOAA on improving wind retrievals and the direct assimilation of GNSS-R data products into forecast models. He has applied GNSS-R techniques to the broad class of satellite communication “signals of opportunity” (SoOp), demonstrating ocean altimetry with 400 MHz Ku/K-band satellite communication transmissions and hurricane-strength ocean wind retrievals using S-band transmissions. Prof. Garrison is leading the development of a prototype instrument for sensing sub-surface (“root-zone”) soil moisture with P-band (230-380 MHz) satellite transmissions, demonstrating the ability of SoOp to operate in a frequency range that is presently very limited for spaceborne remote sensing. He is also collaborating with JPL on applications of these methods for measuring snow.