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Dalia Kirschbaum
Dalia B. Kirschbaum is the Director of the Earth Sciences Division at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Maryland where she leads an organization of civil servants studying the integrated system of Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, biosphere, cryosphere, and geosphere. Her research has focused on utilizing remote sensing for landslide hazard modeling and assessment.

Early Life and Education
Kirschbaum grew up in Minnesota and attended St. Louis Park High School before earning her bachelor’s degree in Geosciences and Environmental Policy at Princeton University in 2004. She then attended Columbia University for graduate school with a focus in applying remotely-sensed data to evaluate hazards, earning her master’s degree in 2006 and her Ph.D. in 2009, both in Earth and Environmental Sciences. She concentrated in Natural Hazards and Remote Sensing with her dissertation on a statistical approach to assessing multi-scale landslide hazard and risk. During her time in graduate school, she was accepted into an Earth systems fellowship at NASA and continued on to a summer internship during her doctoral studies at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Research and Career
Kirschbaum’s research centers on rainfall-triggered landslide modeling, focusing on applying remotely sensed surface and precipitation information to conduct landslide hazard and risk studies at multiple spatial and temporal scales. For example, Kirschbaum and collaborators found that the High Mountain Asia region was susceptible to cascading hazard processes due to triggers such as extreme monsoonal rainfall. Due to steep and inaccessible terrain, in situ surveys within this region are difficult to conduct. By utilizing remote sensing data, Kirschbaum and collaborators were able to construct the first quantitative view of potential modulation in future landslide activity over the High Mountain Asia region. She has applied satellite-based surface and rainfall information within landslide hazard models to support situational awareness of these hazards in near real time. This technique has been used for disaster response by countries around the world as well as groups such as FEMA, the World Bank, the Pacific Disaster Center and others.

Kirschbaum was accepted for a NASA postdoctoral program fellow in the hydrology laboratory at NASA Goddard in 2009. She then worked as a research physical scientist in the Hydrological Sciences Laboratory at NASA Goddard from 2011 to 2020, with the goal of developing new techniques for rainfall-triggered landslide hazard assessment and forecasting using models and remote sensing data. Within this time, she was also the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Mission Project Deputy Applications Scientist in which she led scientific support for research and activities with the ultimate goal of collecting and analyzing global satellite data for scientific and societal benefit. As a part of the GPM mission, she contributed to the development of the Cooperative Open Online Landslide Repository (COOLR), a platform on which citizens and scientists can share reports of landslides. The project is also building the Landslide Hazard Assessment for Situational Awareness (LHASA) to predict landslides with regular, frequent updates and the Landslide Susceptibility Map and the Global Landslide Catalog.

Prior to becoming the Director of the Earth Sciences Division at NASA Goddard in 2022, she served as the Chief of the Hydrological Sciences Laboratory, GSFC Disaster Coordinator, and president of the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) Natural Hazards Section. Furthermore, she has held positions as Editor for Remote Sensing in Earth System Sciences Journal and on the Executive Committee for Natural Hazards Focus Group as well as for the Remote Sensing and Hydrology Focus Group for AGU. Kirschbaum has also spearheaded the Landslide Pilot for the Committee on Earth Observing Satellites (CEOS) Disaster Working Group with other landslide researchers and co-founded the LandAware international consortium on landslide early-warning systems (LEWS).

Awards
2016 Arthur S. Flemming Award in Applied Science and Engineering

2017 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (Awarded by President Obama)

2019 GSFC Science Honor Award

2022 NOAA David Johnson Award

2023 Joanne Simpson Medal