LEILA HASHEMI-BENI received the B.S.degree in civil-surveying engineering (geomatics) from the University of Isfahan, the M.S. degree in civil-surveying engineering (photogrammetry/remote sensing) from the University of Tehran, and the Ph.D. degree in geospatial information systems from Laval University.
She is an Associate Professor and the Director of the NASA-funded Institute for Harnessing Data Science for Environment Management, North Carolina A&T State University. She is a PI/a Co-PI on many projects supported by NASA, NSF, NOAA, Microsoft, North Carolina Collaboratory, and North
Carolina DoT. Her research on AI-based traffic monitoring systems using generative pre-trained transformer models and high-resolution UAV imagery is supported by Microsoft’s Accelerating Foundation Models Research Program. She is a Co-PI on the NC Transportation Centre of Excellence on Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Technology (NC-CAV) funded by the North Carolina Department of Transportation. Her research experience and interests include geospatial data science, UAV and satellite remote sensing, multi-temporal and multisource data fusion and image classification, 3-D data modelling, automatic matching and change detection between various datasets, and developing GIS and remote sensing methodologies for environmental management. She has served as a proposal panellist and a reviewer for many U.S. and international funding organizations. She has served as the chair/the co-chair, or as a scientific committee member for many national or international conferences/workshops. She is serving as the Co-Chair of LiDAR, Laser Altimetry and Sensor Integration Working Group, International Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS).
