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Indian professor leads NASA-funded project to predict wildfire spread
Girish Chowdhury is working with experts from NASA JPL, UC San Diego, and the US Forest Service to develop a special radar to detect understory fuel.
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Girish Chowdhury / LinkedIn
Indian-origin Professor Girish Chowdhury, a leading expert in Agricultural Engineering at Illinois Grainger College of Engineering, is heading an innovative project aimed at improving wildfire prediction and response.
In collaboration with Professor Mohamad Alipour from the Civil Engineering department and a multidisciplinary team, including experts from NASA JPL, UC San Diego, and the US Forest Service, Chowdhury is working to tackle one of the most significant challenges in wildfire management—accurately assessing fire risk and predicting how wildfires spread.
This ambitious project has received $2 million in funding as part of NASA's FireSense Technology Program (FIRET-23), a highly competitive initiative aimed at enhancing Earth observation capabilities for wildfire prediction.
Traditional remote sensing methods struggle to detect the fuel beneath dense forest canopies, such as dry vegetation. To address this issue, Chowdhury's team is developing a cutting-edge UAS(unmanned aerial system)-mounted canopy-penetrating radar system to better sense understory fuel.
By bringing together expertise from various fields, including remote sensing, machine learning, and fire ecology, Chowdhury's team is pushing the boundaries of wildfire research and working towards more effective solutions for disaster response.
Chowdhury's work spans several key areas, including remote sensing, precision agriculture, and environmental monitoring, where he has made significant contributions to developing innovative technologies for addressing real-world challenges.
In addition to his research, Chowdhury is also the Co-founder and CTO of EarthSense, Inc., an agricultural robotics and AI platform.
Born in Mumbai, he spent his early years with his grandparents in Kumta, where his grandfather inspired his interest in science, especially astrophysics. His focus later shifted to aerospace engineering, and he earned a degree from RMIT in Australia.
After working on the ARTIS Unmanned Aircraft project in Germany, he pursued a Ph.D. at Georgia Tech, followed by a postdoc at MIT. He then joined Oklahoma State University as a faculty member.
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