Biography:  Dr. Qihao Weng is the director of the Center for Urban and Environmental Change and a professor of geography at Indiana State University, USA. He was a visiting NASA senior fellow (2008-09). Dr. Weng is also a guest/adjunct professor at several Chinese universities including Peking University, Wuhan University and Beijing Normal University, and a guest research scientist at Beijing Meteorological Bureau, China. He received a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Georgia in 1999. At the same year, he joined the University of Alabama as an assistant professor. Since 2001, he has been a member of the faculty in the Department of Earth and Environmental Systems at Indiana State University, where he teaches courses on remote sensing, GIS, remote sensing-GIS integration, and environmental modeling, and has mentored 9 doctoral and 7 master students.

Dr. Weng has worked extensively with optical and thermal remote sensing data, primarily for urban heat island study, land-cover and impervious surface mapping, urbanization analysis, image analysis algorithms, and the integration with socioeconomic characteristics, with financial support from US funding agencies that include NSF, NASA, USGS, USAID, National Geographic Society, NOAA, and Indiana Dept of Natural Resources. Dr. Weng is the author of over 120 peer-reviewed journal articles and other publications and four books (Urban Remote Sensing; Remote Sensing of Impervious Surfaces; Remote Sensing and GIS Integration; and Advances in Environmental Remote Sensing). Dr. Weng was the recipient of the Robert E. Altenhofen Memorial Scholarship Award by the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (1999), the Best Student-Authored Paper Award by the International Geographic Information Foundation (1998), and the 2010 Erdas Award for Best Scientific Paper in Remote Sensing by ASPRS (1st place). At Indiana State University, he received the Theodore Dreiser Distinguished Research Award in 2006, the university¡¯s highest research honor bestowed to its faculty. In May 2008, he received a prestigious NASA senior fellowship. In April 2011, Dr. Weng was selected as a recipient of Outstanding Contributions Award in Remote Sensing sponsored by American Association of Geographers (AAG) Remote Sensing Specialty Group. Dr. Weng has given 60 invited talks (including colloquia, seminars, keynote address and public speech), and has presented over 70 papers at professional conferences (including co-presenting).

Dr. Weng is currently the chair for AAG China Geography Specialty Group (2010-2011), and was a national director of American Society for Photogrammetric and Remote Sensing (2007-2010), the secretary of ISPRS Working Group VIII/1 (2004-08), and served as a member of U.S. DOE's Cool Roofs Roadmap and Strategy review panel in 2010. In addition, he serves as an Associate Editor of ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetric and Remote Sensing, an Associate Editor-in-Chief of Spatial Hydrology, and is the series editor for both Taylor & Francis Series in Remote Sensing Applications, and McGraw-Hill Series in GIS & T.