Inbal Becker-Reshef Awarded NASA’s Exceptional Public Achievement Medal
Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef, Director of the NASA Harvest Consortium, has been awarded NASA’s Exceptional Public Achievement Medal for her work enabling the use of Earth observation data in support of global food security and agricultural market stability.
The Exceptional Public Achievement Medal is awarded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for a “significant specific achievement or substantial improvement in operations, efficiency, service, financial savings, science, or technology which contributes to the mission of NASA.” The Exceptional Public Achievement Medal is one of the prestigious awards recently announced at NASA’s Agency Honor Awards Ceremony, an event celebrating individuals and teams who have made remarkable contributions to NASA’s public good missions.
Becker-Reshef’s award recognized her role in helping to co-found the NASA Harvest Consortium and direct its work enabling and advancing the adoption of satellite Earth observations by public and private organizations to benefit food security, agriculture, and human and environmental resiliency worldwide. Since NASA Harvest’s founding in 2017, the Consortium has undertaken dozens of projects ranging from cropland boundary and crop type mapping, to yield forecasting and damage assessments, to informing humanitarian aid programs. Under Becker-Reshef's leadership, NASA Harvest has fostered strong collaborations with domestic and foreign government agencies to create national crop monitoring programs, has established partnerships with a variety of leading private and non-governmental companies and organizations in the remote sensing and agriculture sectors, and has built a rapid response team which has been deployed to provide quick actionable Earth observation intelligence during food security threats (including the COVID pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine).
In addition to guiding these activities, Becker-Reshef has been an advocate for the use of Earth observation data for timely and accurate agriculture information, educating and collaborating with various audiences across a range of platforms around the world. To name just a few examples of her many outstanding outreach efforts, she has recently spoken before the United Nations and US Embassies abroad, and she has appeared on television with the BBC.
NASA Harvest congratulates Dr. Becker-Reshef on receiving this prestigious award and looks forward to continuing to make our contributions to the NASA mission.