Departmental Unit № 1
Department of Earth & Environment
PhD in Earth & Environment
100% Full Funding Guaranteed (5 Years)
Funding Package: Full tuition scholarship + 12-month living stipend (~$42,000/yr) + comprehensive health insurance guaranteed for 5 years through Dean's Fellowships and research assistantships.
Fall Priority Deadline: January 1 (Fall Admission)
GRE Policy: Not required / Waived
English Minimums: TOEFL iBT 90 minimum or IELTS 7.0 minimum
MA in Remote Sensing & Geospatial Sciences
Merit Scholarships / Mostly Self-Funded (Target PhD)
Funding Reality: Coursework MA is primarily self-funded; target the PhD track for guaranteed 100% full funding.
Application Deadline: January 15
Admissions Advisory: If full funding is required and MS is self-funded, students are strongly advised to apply directly to the PhD track.
Vetted Matched Scholars (2 Profiles)
Prof. Mark A. Friedl
Professor of Earth & Environment
In Plain Terms · What This Scholar Does:
He developed the official satellite map of the Earth that NASA has used for decades to tell where every forest, desert, city, and farm on our planet is located.
Core Research Topics: Satellite remote sensing, global land cover dynamics, NASA MODIS and Landsat data, vegetation phenology, machine learning for Earth observation.
Recent 2024–2026 Works & Grants: Principal Investigator for NASA's MODIS and Landsat Global Land Cover products. Pioneer in using multi-decadal satellite time series and supervised machine learning algorithms to map global ecosystem changes, agricultural expansion, and deforestation.
Laboratory Instruments & Methods: NASA MODIS/VIIRS/Landsat data processing, machine learning classification (random forests, deep learning), Google Earth Engine, high-performance computing, Python.
Recruiting Context: Premier leader in satellite Earth observation with continuous NASA grant funding.
Candidate Match:
Remote SensingGISGeoAIGeographyPython
Tailored Cold-Email Opening Hook:
"Discussing your experience with satellite image classification and Google Earth Engine, expressing strong interest in his NASA global land cover and vegetation dynamics research."
Prof. Guido D. Salvucci
Professor of Earth & Environment
In Plain Terms · What This Scholar Does:
He solves the math behind how damp soil 'talks' to the atmosphere, proving how dry ground in spring triggers blazing droughts and heatwaves in summer.
Core Research Topics: Hydrology, soil moisture dynamics, land-atmosphere water interactions, groundwater recharge, drought mechanisms, conditional probability in hydrology.
Recent 2024–2026 Works & Grants: Investigates how soil moisture memory controls regional droughts and rainfall, developing statistical methods to infer underground groundwater recharge and evapotranspiration directly from satellite observations and climate variables.
Laboratory Instruments & Methods: Statistical hydrologic models, satellite soil moisture products (SMAP), conditional expectation methods, spatial hydrological grids in Python.
Recruiting Context: Core faculty in physical hydrology within one of the top Earth observation departments in the nation.
Candidate Match:
HydrologyRemote SensingGISPython
Tailored Cold-Email Opening Hook:
"Connecting your GIS spatial analysis and hydrology coursework with his research in soil moisture-precipitation feedbacks and satellite hydrological estimation."