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Two Boise State Graduate students won prestigious NASA FINESST awards in 2025. Juan Camilo Rojas Lucero (Ph.D., Computing, 2027) and Lindsay Stark (Ph.D., Geophysics, 2028) each won a NASA Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology research grant.
The grants will help fund their graduate study and support research projects central to their work at Boise State doctoral students.
“NASA FINESST awards are very competitive. This year only 10% of applications were awarded funding,” said Associate Professor Jodi Brandt, who advises Lucero. “Any university would be pleased to have just one graduate student win a fellowship. The fact that Boise State has two this year speaks to the great environment we have for graduate education.”
AI for remote sensing in arid regions
Boise State’s Ph.D. in computing program challenges students to use cutting-edge computer technology to solve problems in other disciplines. Lucero, working with advisors Brandt (human-environment systems) and Trevor Caughlin (biological sciences), is using artificial intelligence and deep learning to monitor water levels in semi-arid regions.
Right now there are decades worth of satellite images of the Earth. It’s more than any one researcher can parse alone. However, leveraging artificial intelligence, Lucero hopes to analyze this treasure trove of data. Computational tools can help us understand seasonal moisture trends in semi-arid regions, including Idaho’s Snake River Plain. Accurate models are especially important in these regions, where water is a precious resource that drives agriculture and rangeland management.
“That is one of the biggest accomplishments in my life,” Lucero said. “I’ve worked with NASA geospatial data for many years, so [this award] means a lot personally and professionally.”
Using radar to track remote caribou herds
The Porcupine Caribou Herd ranges across the far north of Alaska, the Yukon and the Northern Territories. It’s extremely difficult to track the herd in this remote territory, but Stark’s research may change that. Stark, working with her advisor HP Marshall, is exploring the possibility of using existing satellite-mounted radar systems to track caribou.
“We can have way better knowledge of this herd, which is a huge economic and cultural food source in Alaska,” she said.
However, existing radar systems are designed mostly to monitor snow and ice. There’s little information about how to track a herd of caribou across the arctic. Nobody knows what a caribou even looks like on a radar image.
Stark is using reindeer and elk in Idaho to help fill in that picture. “We can do a bunch of scans and collect a large array of data that says ‘this is how much a caribou, or an elk in this case, increases the brightness of the backscatter’,” she said. Backscatter is the radio signal reflected back at the radar system after bouncing off an object.