Rate My Professor Shunlin Liang

Professor Shunlin Liang is the Chair Professor of Remote Sensing and Head of the Department of Geography at the University of Hong Kong. He earned his BS and MS degrees from Nanjing University and PhD from Boston University in 1993. From 1993 to 2022, he worked at the University of Maryland, advancing quantitative remote sensing research. Previously, he served as Dean of the School of Geography at Beijing Normal University and Associate Director of the State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Sciences. At HKU, he also directs the Jockey Club STEM Laboratory of Quantitative Remote Sensing and teaches courses such as Earth as Seen by Satellite and Advanced Remote Sensing and GIS.

His research specializes in remote sensing physical modeling and inversion, global satellite product generation including the widely used Global LAnd Surface Satellite (GLASS) products suite, Earth’s energy budget, and global and regional environmental changes. Professor Liang has published over 430 peer-reviewed English journal papers in top outlets like Science, Nature Climate Change, and Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, with key works including the GLASS products suite in BAMS (2021) and satellite remote sensing in climate change studies in Nature Climate Change (2013). He has authored or edited eight English books—five translated into Chinese—including Quantitative Remote Sensing of Land Surfaces (John Wiley & Sons, 2004, 534 pages), Advanced Remote Sensing: Terrestrial Information Extraction and Applications, Second Edition (Academic Press, 2019, 1010 pages), and as Editor-in-Chief, the nine-volume Comprehensive Remote Sensing (Elsevier, 2017), with a second edition in progress. As of November 2025, his Google Scholar H-index is 109, with over 50,000 citations. He is Editor-in-Chief of Science of Remote Sensing, former Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (2001-2013), Fellow of IEEE and AAAS (elected 2023), and a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher. His leadership extends to numerous international conference committees and symposia.