DroneCamp 2019 Student Scholarships

We are very pleased to announce the recipients of the 2019 student scholarship awards for DroneCamp 2019. We were able to leverage seed support from the open access journal Drones (dedicated to research on the design and applications of drones) to support three wonderful young scholars to attend DroneCamp 2019 in Monterey CA in June. Here is a little bit about each of them.

Melinda Reyes is the recipient of the Drones scholarship. A computer science student at Northeastern University, Melinda aims to improve precision agriculture tools that measure and advance soil health and soil-based carbon capture via data collected by UAVs. Her ultimate goal is to ensure food security in a changing climate. She is passionate about UAVs and their applications in agriculture, and is a future leader in agricultural innovation.  She comes to DroneCamp to learn to fly drones, to learn more about current applications in the field, and to meet others interested in UAVs' agricultural applications and applications for good.

Zack Dinh is the recipient of the IGIS student scholarship. He is a M.S. student in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. He is working with Professor Iryna Dronova at UC Berkeley on wetland restoration monitoring in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Together, they are interested in using UAV-captured optical imagery and point clouds to detect vegetation patch heterogeneity, and plant growth. He comes to DroneCamp to learn about best practices for using UAVs for field research as well as networking with others who are engaged in this type of research. He has some experience flying UAV surveys and processing imagery, and is interested in learning more about fixed-wing vehicles, sensors, and data processing techniques.

Anish Sapkota is the recipient of the IGIS student scholarship. He is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of California, Riverside. He is working in the Irrigation and Water Management Lab under the supervision of Dr. Haghverdi. His research focuses on the effect of water-stress conditions in landscape and agricultural crop species, and he seeks to develop irrigation management strategies to save water while increasing production, and soil and plant health. His research involves collection of data from a range of handheld sensors that measure stomatal conductance, biomass growth, and soil moisture. These data will be combined with NDVI and NDRE data from field and UAV-based sensors to determine the stress level in plants and their response to varying rates of irrigation. He comes to DroneCamp to continue to gather skills in the geospatial domain, and to learn how to fly drones, and process UAV data.

Congratulations to each of you!