Established in 2011, the Professional Engineer and Scientist Exchange Program (PESEP) Task Force consists of one representative each from the ISRO Space Application Centre (SAC), ISRO National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), ISRO Satellite Centre (ISAC), NASA, the US Department of Commerce National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the US Department of the Interior United States Geological Survey (USGS) with the plan to collaborate to improve harmonization of joint studies of Earth observations and science through visits of engineers and scientists. Dr. Thenkabail’s visit focused on agriculture, water, hyperspectral remote sensing, food security, and crop water productivity studies of mutual interest to both countries using earth observation data from NASA and ISRO satellites. He visited the National Remote Sensing Center (NRSC) of India in Hyderabad and the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing (IIRS) in Dehra Dun. During his visit, as part of NRSC celebrations for completing 50 years, the Indian Society for Remote Sensing (ISRS) Annual Symposium was held from 15-17 November 2022 along with Geo Smart India. At this meeting, Dr. Thenkabail presented an invited Plenary talk entitled: “A paradigm-shift in Mapping the Planet Earth from Satellites: petabyte scale big-data analytics, Machine learning, and cloud computing for global food and water security in the twenty-first century". The India-U.S. Task Force on PESEP prepared a PESEP Participation Certificate for presentation to Dr. Thenkabail by Dr. Prakash Chauhan, director, NRSC. He is the first PESEP Visitor to receive this honor.

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