Virginia Brancato received the M.Sc. degree in Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Naples, Federico II, Naples, Italy and the Ph.D. degree in Environmental Engineering from ETH Zurich, Zurich Switzerland in 2018. She is currently a NASA funded Post-Doctoral Fellow with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. She is also a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine. Her research interest mainly focuses on the understanding of Antarctic and Greenlandic short-term glacier dynamics (i.e. grounding line migration), mainly using repeat-pass SAR Interferometry. Additionally, her expertise includes the development of electromagnetic models and the characterization of uncertainties of remote sensing products. This embraces a wide range of approaches including signal, data processing, and statistical techniques.
- 2014-2018 Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
- 2012-2014 M.Sc. in Telecommunication Engineering, University of Naples, Federico II, Naples, Italy
- Glaciology
- Short-term glacier dynamics (i.e. grounding line migration)
- Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)
- SAR Interferometry, SAR Polarimetry
- SAR Tomography
- Differential SAR Interferometry
- Airborne Repeat-Pass Interferometry
- Signal Processing
- Electromagnetic Modelling
- Soil moisture and vegetation biomass estimation
- NASA Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
- Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of California, Irvine
- NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship (NPP) at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (2018).
- Master Thesis Scholarship at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) (2013).
- Brancato, Virginia, Frank Liebisch, and Irena Hajnsek. "Impact of plant surface moisture on differential interferometric observables: A controlled electromagnetic experiment." IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing 55, no. 7 (2017): 3949-3964.
- Brancato, Virginia, and Irena Hajnsek. "Analyzing the Influence of Wet Biomass Changes in Polarimetric Differential SAR Interferometry at L-Band." IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing 11, no. 5 (2018): 1494-1508.
- Brancato, Virginia, and Irena Hajnsek. "Separating the Influence of Vegetation Changes in Polarimetric Differential SAR Interferometry." IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing 99 (2018): 1-13.
- Brancato, Virginia, Marc Jäger, Rolf Scheiber, and Irena Hajnsek. "A Motion Compensation Strategy for Airborne Repeat-Pass SAR Data." IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters 99 (2018): 1-5.
