Cohort: 2025-2026
Name: Roshan Mishra
Major/University: Atmospheric Physics, UMBC
Research Title/Project: “Quantifying the Temporal Dynamics of Smoke Absorption Using Geostationary Observations”
Research Mentors: Zhibo Zhang (UMBC Advisor, Physics/GESTAR II) and Yingxi Shi (613/UMBC/GESTAR II)
What attracted you to this fellowship opportunity?
What drew me most to this fellowship is its perfect match to both the scientific scope and the professional environment my research on geostationary retrievals of wildfire-smoke absorption requires. The fellowship explicitly encourages joint projects with UMBC/GESTAR II faculty and NASA GSFC scientists, giving me direct access to the mentors, satellite‐data resources, and radiative-transfer expertise that underpin my proposal on the GEO-based Critical Reflectance method to quantify minute- to day-scale variations in smoke absorption right after the emission. Just as compelling is the program’s holistic support package—tuition, health insurance, a PhD-level stipend, plus funding for conference and publication costs—because it lets me devote the next year entirely to advancing my ongoing work and rapidly disseminating the results to the community. Finally, sharing progress with the wider Earth-science community through GESTAR II seminars, conferences, and peer-reviewed publications will sharpen my communication and collaboration skills, positioning me for a future career in satellite remote sensing and Earth-system science.
Cohort: 2024-2025
Name: Kamal Aryal
Major/University: Atmospheric Physics, UMBC
Research Title/Project: “Development of an efficient and accurate atmospheric correction algorithm for hyperspectral radiometer based on co-located multiangle polarimeter measurements”
Research Mentors: Pengwang Zhai (UMBC Advisor) and Susanne Craig (616/UMBC/GESTAR II)
What attracted you to this fellowship opportunity?
What attracted me to this fellowship is that it gives me the chance to work with my advisor Dr. Pengwang Zhai and GESTAR II scientist Dr. Susanne Craig on an innovative project. Additionally, this fellowship offers me an unique opportunity to share my research with a large group of people working with GESTAR II, which I hope will be extremely important for networking as I am nearing completion of my PhD studies. With this fellowship, I proposed to develop an integrated algorithm to be used to process data from NASA’s recently launched PACE mission. The proposed algorithm can take advantage of complementary measurements from all three instruments in the PACE mission (UMBC HARP2, SPEXone and OCI). Once developed, I am hopeful the algorithm will prove to be a robust platform to study the atmosphere and ocean. This is what I am excited about.