Dr. Ruiliang Pu received an M.Sc (1985) from Nanjing Forestry University (NFU), China, and earned a Ph.D. (Cartography & Geographic Information System, 2000), conducted at University of California (UC) at Berkeley, from Chinese Academy of Sciences. He was a visiting scholar between 1990-1991 in Institute for Space and Terrestrial Sciences, Ontario, Canada. He was a visiting scholar at The University of Calgary, Canada, in 1994. He moved to the United States in 1995. He was a Research Associate later on an Assistant Researcher at UC Berkeley between 1995 and 2005. He has worked for one year as a Visiting Research Scientist with Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, University of Maryland at College Park before moving to University of South Florida (USF) in 2006. He has published more than 100 journal papers, book chapters and segments in English and more than 26 journal papers and books in Chinese. He has been awarded the science and technology prizes three times by the Chinese government between 1986 and 1991 because of his excellent research achievements. He has been a reviewer of USA NASA, Canada NSERC and Belgian Science Policy research proposals and more than 20 journals’ papers. He also is currently an editorial board member/academic editor of Remote Sensing journal and Geosciences journal with MDPI.

Dr. Pu is currently a Professor with the School of Geosciences, USF and his research experience and interests are in remote sensing, GIS and spatial statistics with direct applications to natural hazard monitoring, land use/cover change detection, biophysical and biochemical parameters extraction, and coastal and terrestrial ecosystems modeling. His current research interests are in mapping and characterization of seagrass habitats using spacecraft observations and urban environmental studies using thermal and optical remote sensing data with an emphasis on analysis of high spatial and spectral resolution satellite imagery.