Cunren Liang is currently Assistant Professor at School of Earth and Space Sciences, Peking University. Previously, he was a Staff Scientist at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California (2018-2021). Prior to joining Caltech, he was a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) also in Pasadena (2015-2018). He received the B.S. degree from Shandong University of Science and Technology in 2008, and the Ph.D. degree from Peking University in 2014.

Cunren Liang mainly works on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) signal processing, interferometry (InSAR), remote sensing and their applications in geoscience and hazard response. He was a member of JPL/Caltech ARIA team and involved in a number of NASA projects such as NISAR Mission Science Team and NASA Earth Surface and Interior. He developed cutting-edge algorithms for processing multi-mode SAR data acquired by JAXA ALOS-2 satellite. He also developed techniques to correct for InSAR ionospheric effects for data acquired in different modes and at different wavelengths. His work demonstrated the possibility of measuring large-scale north-south deformation and line-of-sight velocities with L-band wide-swath SAR data, as we are going to enter a new era of L-band wide-swath mode. He contributed a number of modules and applications to the widely used InSAR software ISCE. He won Best Paper Award for Young Scientist at ESA-NRSCC Symposium (2010 and 2012), NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellowship (2014), NASA Group Achievement Award (2016) and JPL Outstanding Postdoctoral Research Award (2017).

Prospective Students and Postdocs

We are multidisciplinary and welcome students of different backgrounds such as electrical engineering, computer science, remote sensing, geophysics, geographic information system, geomatics etc. If you are interested in joining our group as a master’s or PhD student, or a postdoc (e.g. Boya Postdoc Fellowship at Peking University, two rounds of applications per year, 北京大学博雅博士后), please email Cunren Liang at cunren.liang@pku.edu.cn.