Carmela Galdi

Carmela Galdi is Associate Professor of Telecommunications at Università degli Studi del Sannio, Benevento. She received the Electronic Engineering degree in December 1992, at Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II where, in 1997, she also received the Ph.D in Electronic Engineering with a thesis on the statistical models of the radar backscattering from the sea surface. In February 2000 she became Assistant Professor at Università degli Studi del Sannio where, since February 2005, she is Associate Professor. She has been Chair of the Master of Science in Electrical Engineering for Automation and Telecommunications from 2011 to 2015, and in 2013 she has been nominated by the Rector as member of the Committee for the Orientation of the Università degli Studi del Sannio.

She worked at Alcatel Face (Italy Division) in 1993/94, and in 1994 she started the PhD programme. In the period 1995-1998, she spent several periods of study and research abroad: at the Signal Processing Division, University of Strathclyde in Glasgow (UK), where she worked on wavelet transform based techniques for processing and coding of SAR images; at the Electronic Engineering Department, University College London, (UK) for research activities on the statistical models of radar backscattering from natural surfaces, with emphasis on parameter estimation problems; at Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) in Malvern (UK) for the research project “CFAR algorithms for compound Gaussian clutter” in cooperation with the Electronic Engineering Department of Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II.

Carmela Galdi's scientific interests are in the area of statistical signal processing, with application to radar detection and remote sensing. Research activities are focused on processing and analysis of remote sensing data, for modelling and extraction of information about land and sea and also for estimating the concentration of trace gases in the atmosphere. Main research interests in the past years were

- non-Gaussian models for radar detection;

- processing of MODIS data for thermal anomalies detection on the earth surface;

- retrieval of the vertical column concentrations of trace-gases from remote sensing data.

Currently the research activities are focused on GNSS Reflectometry for ocean remote sensing. Key points are

• definition of a physical/statistical model to simulate the whole system, and generate the received signal and delay-Doppler maps with different ocean conditions;
• second order statistical characterization of the received signal for a correct exploitation of the correlation properties into the simulation process;
• retrieval of wind speed from delay-Doppler maps;
• among other possible applications, the ship detection on the sea surface seems promising;
• analysis of the scattering from wetlands and inland waters.

Some of the above activities are included in a cooperation agreement with the NASA CYGNSS project, to which Carmela Galdi has been associated as external science team member since 2015.

In the period 2007-2012, she has also cooperated with the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) in Southampton, UK, on a project about GNSS-R of the ocean surface. In this framework she has been supervisor of a master thesis in Telecommunication Engineering, developed at NOC laboratories, and member of a PhD panel at University of Southampton as a supervisor of research activities in this field.

In the past years, Carmela Galdi was involved in research projects of FIRB-CMCC (Centro Euro-Mediterraneo per i Cambiamenti Climatici), that are developed at the Inter-Department Centre TEDASS (Tecnologie per la Diagnostica Ambientale e lo Sviluppo Sostenibile) at Università degli Studi del Sannio.

She has participated at the design and the realization of MARSec, Mediterranean Agency for Remote Sensing and Environmental Control, in Benevento, and she has a scientific cooperation with the centre, especially on the theme of fire and thermal anomalies detection. She worked with Space Science Engineering Centre, University of Wisconsin, Madison, in coordinating the activities for direct broadcast of satellite data at the MARSec receiving station.

Carmela Galdi was in the organizing committee of the EAQUATE mission (European AQUA Thermodynamic Experiment) in 2004; in 2009 the mission received the group achievement award from NASA “for outstanding achievement in conducting EAQUATE including deployment of the NAST-I instrument aboard the Proteus aircraft”.

She participated at organization of International NASA EOS/NPP Direct Readout Meeting, held at MARSsec in Benevento from 3 October to 6 October 2006. She has been in the organizing committe of the 2008 IEEE Radar Conference, as Publicity Chair.

She has been general co-chair in the 2019 IEEE GNSS+R Conference, hosted by Università del Sannio in Benevento. She is Guest Editor for the Special Issue on Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) Early on Orbit Performance and for the Special Issue on Recent Advances in Reflectometry using GNSS and other Signals of Opportunity, published on the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing.

Carmela Galdi is reviewer for several scientific journals, like Signal Processing Journal, Elsevier; EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing; Signal, Image and Video Processing, Springer; IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems; IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing; IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.