Gilberto Câmara

National Institute for Space Research, Brazil

Dr. Gilberto Câmara is General Director of Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE). He served a four-year term as Director from 2005 to 2009 and has been selected to serve a second four-year term from 2010 to 2013. INPE´s achievements during his terms as director include: (a) a 100% increase in INPE's budget for 2006-2010, compared with 2001-2005; (b) a 10-year plan for Brazilian satellites, including international cooperation with China, USA, and Argentina and a major increase in contracts with Brazilian industries; (c) an open access policy for INPE's remote sensing and meteorological data and products; (d) significant improvements in monitoring Amazonia, which helped Brazil reduce deforestation by 300% from 2004 to 2010;  (f) a new Centre for Earth System Science and a new supercomputer for weather forecasts and climate change research.

He has published more than 120 full papers on refereed journals and scientific conferences, and he is a leading resercher in Geoinformatics and Environmental Modelling in Brazil. His group at INPE develops open source software for geospatial data handling.  He serves on the Scientific Steering Committee of Global Land Project and on the editorial board of the journals Earth Science Informatics and Computers, Environment and Urban Systems. According to Google Scholar, his h-index is 25 and my number of citations is over 4500, as of March 2010.