Dr. Marc Simard is Senior Research Scientist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. He first joined JPL as an NRC postdoctoral fellow in 1998. He is the Principal Investigator of Delta-X, a NASA Earth Venture Suborbital mission. Simard is a member of the NASA/CNES SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) Science Team and the STV (Surface Topography and Vegetation) Incubation Study Team. He is also a Project Scientist Step-2 with UCLA’s Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science and Engineering (JIFRESSE) and an active member of the International Blue Carbon Working Group (The Blue Carbon Initiative, CI, UNEP, IUCN).

Marc Simard’s research focuses on the development of radar remote sensing techniques to retrieve geophysical parameters required to understand the role and feedback of climatic and hydrogeomorphic processes on vegetation structure and productivity, with a particular emphasis on coastal environments. Simard has led or co-led over 20 competitive NASA-funded research projects, and has extensively published in peer-reviewed literature. His early research was dedicated to the development and refinement of interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), polarimetric InSAR (PolInSAR) and Lidar/InSAR/PolinSAR fusion algorithms to characterize land surface topography and the vertical structure of vegetation. Simard then used these matured technologies to model ecosystem productivity as a function of climatic, hydrological and geophysical variables. More recently, he led the development of new multi-instrument airborne remote sensing techniques to measure high-frequency hydrological and sediment transport processes, which drive ecosystem productivity and resilience of river deltas in the face of climate change. These novel techniques led to the Delta-X mission, led by Simard, which calibrate hydrodynamic and ecological models to forecast the fate of the Mississippi River Delta. In parallel, Simard is working on adapting these multi-instrument techniques to upcoming spaceborne missions such as NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR), Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) and the Surface Topography and Vegetation (STV) to study hydrologic and ecological processes contributing to the global carbon cycle and river deltas’ resilience to climate change. He is a co-author of NISAR’s handbook and the STV White Paper, and the developer of SWOT algorithms specific to retrieval of hydrodynamic parameters in deltas and estuaries.