Lecturers

Matthias Weiß is research scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar Techniques FHR. He received the Dipl.-Ing. degree in electronic engineering from the Technical University of Braunschweig/Germany in 1992 in electrical engineering with the focus on high frequency and optics.

He started to work at the Technical Faculty of Engineering at Christian-Albrechts University of Kiel, Germany, where he received his PhD in electric engineering in 1998. Dr. Weiß joined in 2001 Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physic and Radar Technique, Wachtberg, Germany, where he is currently a Senior Researcher working in the area of digital radar, signal processing, digital beamforming, MIMO radar, distributed radar networks and compressive sensing.

Dr. Weiß has been visiting scientist at the Institute for Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment (IREA) of the Italian National Research Council, Naples. Since 2009 Dr. Weiß is organizing and likewise lecturing at the International Summer School on Radar/SAR of the Fraunhofer Institute, he also organized and chaired sessions dedicated to SAR/SAS processing in several international conferences. He has authored and co-author of numerous papers (peer-review journals and proceedings of international conferences) and frequently serves as a reviewer for various international conferences and journals. He was and is member of the scientific program committees of several international conferences and served as an Editor of the special issue dedicated to EUSAR 2008 of the IET Radar, Sonar & Navigation and of the IEEE Transaction on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (TGARS) dedicated to EUSAR 2010 and 2012, respectively.

He organized several NATO Specialist Meetings, Symposia, and Lecture Series, where he also gives lectures. Since 2006 he is the EUSAR Executive, and he has been the Technical Chair of EUSAR 2010, 2012, and 2018. In 2012, 2013, and 2016 he organized the International Workshop on Compressed Sensing applied to Radar (CoSeRa) in Bonn and Aachen, Germany, the NATO Specialist Meeting SET-213 on “Compressed Sensing for Radar/SAR and EO/IR imaging” 2014, and for CoSeRa 2015, Pisa, he served as a technical chair. His general interests are in the areas of signal processing, estimation and detection, super-resolution spectral analysis, array processing, and compressive sensing techniques, with application to radar systems and distributed sensor networks.

Paul Rosen is Manager of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Radar Science & Engineering Section, a group of nearly 130 scientists and engineers defining, designing, and building state-of-the-art radar instruments for NASA's Earth and planetary science missions.

Dr. Pierfrancesco Lombardo graduated in1991 at the University of Rome "La Sapienza", Italy. After serving at the Official Test Center of the Italian Air Force, he was associated at Birmingham University (UK) and at Defense Research Agency in Malvern. In 1995 he received his Ph.D and was research associate at Syracuse University (NY-USA). In 1996 he joined the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, where he is presently Full Professor.

Dr. Lombardo is involved in, and coordinates, research projects funded by European and National Research Agencies and national industries. He leads the “Radar, Remote Sensing and Navigation” (RRSN) group at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. He chairs the Cosmo SkyMed consulting group for the Italian Space Agency. His main interests are radar adaptive signal processing, radar clutter modelling, radar coherent detection, passive radar and multistatic radar, SAR processing and radio-localization systems.

Dr. Lombardo’s research has been reported in over 250 publications in international technical journals and conferences. He is co-recipient of the Barry Carlton award (best paper) of IEEE Trans. on AES for year 2001 and of the best paper award for the IEEE Trans. on Geoscience and Remote Sensing for year 2003.

He served in the technical committee of many international conferences on radar systems and signal processing. He was Technical Committee Chairman of the IEEE/ISPRS Workshop on Remote Sensing and Data Fusion over Urban Areas URBAN’2001, Rome, URBAN’2003, Berlin, and URBAN’2005, Tempe (US).  He was also Technical Chairman of the IEEE Radar Conference 2008.

Dr. Lombardo is associate Editor for Radar Systems for the IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems (AES) since June 2001 and Technical Editor for radar System since January 2016. He is member of the IEEE AES Radar System Panel and the Editorial board of IET Proceedings on Radar Sonar and Navigation.

Dr. Stephan Stanko received the Diploma and Dr. rer.-nat. degrees in Physics from Cologne University, Germany. He is now an active researcher and the head of Department High Frequency Radar and Applications at the Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar Techniques FHR. The focus of his work is the design and development of millimetre- and submillimeterwave Radar systems and the miniaturization and implementation of these systems in flying platforms.

He gave lectures on Radar Techniques at the Universtity of Duisburg as well as the Universtity of Applied Sciences in Koblenz and has contributed to many Fraunhofer FHR summer schools in the SAR workshops.

Christoph H. Gierull received the Dr.-Ing. degree from the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, in 1995. Since 2011, he has been an Adjunct Prof. at Laval University, Quebec, Canada. From 1991-1994 he was a scientist with the research establishment FGAN, Germany.

In 1994 he joined the German Aerospace Center DLR, where he headed the SAR Simulation Group. Since 2000 he has been a Senior Defence Scientist with DRDC Ottawa assuming the duties of Group Leader, Space-Based Radar. As part of a DLR team he assured X-band-SAR performance during SRTM at NASA's Mission Control in Houston. From 2006-2009 he was on assignment to Fraunhofer FHR, Germany. He has been a Technical Advisor to the Canadian and European space agencies on several SAR missions including RADARSAT-2, RCM and Sentinel-1.

Dr. Gierull is author and coauthor of numerous journal publications, scientific reports and a chapter in Application of Space-Time Adaptive Processing (IEE, 2004). He served as Associate Editor for EURASIP's Signal Processing in 2004 and for IEEE Trans. Geosc. & Remote Sensing 2010-2013. He initiated and organized the first Special Issue on Multi-channel Spaced-Based SAR in IEEE JSTARS, Nov. 2015. He is a co-editor and author of a chapter in the textbook Novel Radar Techniques and Applications (IET, 2017).

He filed a CAN/US patent application on vessel detection in SAR imagery. Dr. Gierull received the Best Annual Paper Award of the Association of German Electrical Engineers in 1998 and jointly the Best Paper Awards at the Int. Radar Conf. 2004, the EUSAR 2006 as well as EUSAR 2016. He is recipient of DRDC's S&T Performance Excellence Award 2013, and winner of the IEEE Geoscience & Remote Sensing Society 2016 J-STARS Paper Award. Dr. Gierull is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a Fellow of the IET.

Alexander Yarovoy graduated from the Kharkov State University, Ukraine, in 1984 with the Diploma with honor and received Dr and DSc (Dr. habil.) degrees in 1987 and 1994, respectively. From September 1994 through 1996 he was with Technical University of Ilmenau, Germany as a Visiting Researcher. Since 1999 he is with the Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands.  Since 2009 he leads there a chair of Microwave Sensing, Signals and Systems.

His main research interests are in ultra-wideband microwave technology and its applications (in particular, radars) and applied electromagnetics (in particular, UWB antennas). He has authored and co-authored some 250 scientific or technical papers, three patents and fourteen book chapters. He served as a Guest Editor of five special issues of the IEEE Transactions and other journals.

Prof. Yarovoy is the recipient of the European Microwave Week Radar Award for the paper that best advances the state-of-the-art in radar technology in 2001 (together with L.P. Ligthart and P. van Genderen) and in 2012 (together with T. Savelyev). In 2010 together with D. Caratelli Prof. Yarovoy got the best paper award of the Applied Computational Electromagnetic Society (ACES).

Prof. Yarovoy served as the Chair and TPC chair of the 5th European Radar Conference (EuRAD’08), Amsterdam, the Netherlands, as well as the Secretary of the 1st European Radar Conference (EuRAD’04), Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Since 2008 he serves as Director of the European Microwave Association (EuMA).

Paulo Marques received the B.S. degree in electronics and telecommunications engineering from Higher Engineering Institute of Lisbon (ISEL) in 1990 and the E. E., M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Technical University of Lisbon (IST) in 1993, 1997, and 2004, respectively.

In his PhD thesis he addressed the problem of detection of moving targets and full velocity vector and trajectory estimation using single channel SAR. In the past years he has been contributing in a wide range of problems in synthetic aperture radar, noise radar and passive radar in several European projects and in NATO research groups.

In 2010 he became the head of the Department of Electronics and Communications Engineering of ISEL and in 2016 he was responsible for the conception of a new engineering degree joining Informatics, Computer Networks and Telecommunications skills in a modern, software defined, approach.

Paulo Marques is author and co-author of more than 70 papers in which he is mostly first author and frequently serves as a referee for many international journals and conferences. He is currently a Coordinator Professor at ISEL, Department of Electronics and Communications Engineering where he coordinates the telecommunications group of professors and gives lectures on subjects related with digital signal/image processing, telecommunications and radar.

He is also a researcher with the Pattern and Image Analysis group at Telecommunications Institute of Lisbon. His expertise topics include Synthetic Aperture Radar, Moving Target Indication, Signal and Image Processing, Noise Radar and Passive Radar.

Gianfranco Fornaro graduated, cum laude, in Electronic Engineering at the University of Napoli in 1992 and received the Ph.D. degree in Telecommunications in 1997.  Since 1993 he has been with the “Istituto per il Rilevamento Elettromagnetico dell’Ambiente (IREA)” of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) where he currently holds the position of Senior Researcher. He has been Adjunct Professor of Communications at the Universities of Cassino and Naples “Federico II” and of Signal Theory at the University of Reggio Calabria.

Dr. Fornaro has been visiting scientist at the German Aerospace Establishment (DLR), also for within the Italy-Germany cooperation during the SIR-C/X-SAR mission and at Politecnico of Milano. He has been also invited lecturer at the Istituto Tecnologico de Aeronautica (ITA) in Sao José dos Campos (Brazil) and RESTEC (Tokyo).

He has been chairman and convenor of special sessions in several conferences dedicated to SAR processing and SAR Interferometry; he has authored more than a hundred of papers (peer-review journals and proceedings of international conferences).

Dr. Fornaro in 2005 served as editor of the “Advances in Interferometric SAR processing” special issue of the EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing (JASP) and was awarded in 1997 of the Mountbatten Premium by the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE).

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Joachim Ender held the positions as director of the Fraunhofer-Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar Technology FHR at Wachtberg, Germany, and as chair for High Frequency Sensors and Radar Techniques at the University of Siegen, Center for Sensor Systems ZESS until July 2016.

After his diploma in mathematics / physics he performed research on various topics of radar science since more than forty years. He started his carrier as young scientist in 1976, was appointed as head of department in 1999, and finally took over the function as the director of the FHR in 2003.

After his retirement he is still active as senior scientist at the FHR and as senior member and professor at the Center for Sensor Systems (ZESS) of the University Siegen.

Joachim Ender is author and co-author of numerous papers. Among other prizes, he received from EURASIP the “Group Technical Achievement Award - For contributions to Array Signal Processing and Multichannel Synthetic Aperture Radar”.

In 2014 he was named as an IEEE-fellow „for contributions to multi-channel synthetic aperture radar and radar array signal processing“.

He was one of the founder members of the “European Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar” (EUSAR) which takes place every two years since 1996.

Joachim Ender created together with Prof. Holger Rauhut and Matthias Weiß the “International workshop on compressive sensing applied to radar” (CoSeRa) which started in April 2012 at Bonn, Germany.

In 2009 Joachim Ender founded together with Matthias Weiß the “International Summer School on Radar and SAR”, taking place each July at a nice location at the river Rhine.