Adjunct Faculty: Darrel Williams

Darrel L. Williams currently serves as the Associate Chief for Science in the Laboratory for Terrestrial Physics, within the Earth Sciences Directorate, at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He completed his Masters in Forest Science at Pennsylvania State University in 1974 and a PhD in Physical Geography at the University of Maryland College Park in 1989. He continues to serve as the Landsat Project Scientist, a position he has held since 1992. In this position he is responsible for ensuring the scientific integrity of the highly successful Landsat 7 mission currently in orbit. Prior to his selection as Associate Chief, he served as Head of the Biospheric Sciences Branch from 1991 through September 2001. He began his NASA service in 1975 as a Research Scientist in that same organization. Throughout his NASA career he has been actively involved in remote sensing research. The majority of his work has involved the development of enhanced techniques for assessing forest ecosystems. Landsat imagery depicting some of these techniques were on display for several years in the “Looking at Earth from Space” room at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum. Geographical areas of study have included numerous sites throughout the U.S., as well as sites in Canada, Russia (Siberia), China and the Dominican Republic. During his tenure as Head of the Biospheric Sciences Branch, that organization successfully completed the FIFE project in the prairie grasslands of Kansas, and they initiated and successfully completed the BOREAS project in the boreal forest biome of Canada. He also serves as the Project Manager for the current LBA-ECO project in Brazil. He has authored and/or co-authored over 70 publications in the field of quantitative remote sensing in such categories as refereed journal articles, book chapters, and/or proceedings articles.