Rate My Professor Alemu Gonsamo

Alemu Gonsamo is an Associate Professor in the School of Earth, Environment & Society at McMaster University. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Remote Sensing of Terrestrial Ecosystems. His research focuses on ground, airborne, and satellite remote sensing of vegetation from the leaf to the global scale, with emphasis on plant structural and photosynthetic traits, land surface and carbon uptake phenology, terrestrial ecosystem primary productivity and greenness, global change impacts on terrestrial ecosystem productivity, and terrestrial carbon cycle modelling. He conducts studies at ecological monitoring sites such as eddy covariance tower networks, develops improved remote sensing products at regional scales including leaf area index, primary productivity, and land surface phenology, and assesses global change impacts at regional and global scales using satellite data, ground measurements, gridded climate records, and Earth system models.

Gonsamo earned his BSc from Hawassa University in Ethiopia, his MSc from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and his PhD from the University of Helsinki in Finland. He completed postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto. He serves on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science, as Associate Editor for the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences (2021-2026), and on the Editorial Board of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology. His work has contributed to numerous peer-reviewed publications in the fields of remote sensing and global change ecology, with significant citation impact.