Background
Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef is the Program Director of NASA Harvest, leading the overall program, research and vision for Harvest. Inbal's work is focused on the application of satellite information for agricultural monitoring from the field to global scales, supporting decisions in food security and agricultural markets. She worked closely with national and international partners to initiate the GEOGLAM (GEO Global Agricultural Monitoring) Program, adopted by the G20 in 2011 under the action plan on food price volatility and agriculture. Within this program she is a Program Scientist at the GEOGLAM Secretariat, leading the Crop Monitor initiative, which brings together close to 40 national and international organizations to provide operational monthly global assessments of crop conditions and prospects for the main food suppliers and export countries of the world, as well as for the countries most vulnerable to food insecurity.
Inbal is a Co-Director of the Center for Global Agricultural Monitoring Research at UMD, and a member of the AMIS Steering Committee, GEOGLAM-Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) Technical Team, NASA Water Resources Applied Science Team, and leads the NASA SERVIR Food Security and Agriculture Theme of the Applied Sciences Team. Her background is in soil sciences and remote sensing and she received her Ph.D in Geographical Sciences from the University of Maryland in 2012. She was recently recognized by the US State Department for her work on Food Security and Technologies, winning the US Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Science Prize for Innovation, Research, and Education (ASPIRE) awarded by John Holdren, Former Assistant to the President for Science and Technology.