Robert E. Crippen is a Research Scientist in the Terrestrial Science Research Element at JPL. His academic training is in the geological sciences and in geographic analysis, and he earned an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Earth Science Remote Sensing from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1989.

Highlights of his career include several innovative image processing methods for enhanced information extraction from earth observation data sets. He demonstrated the ability to obtain sub-pixel measures of terrain displacements (e.g. earthquake strain fields and sand dune migration).

His recent work includes development of methods to suppress vegetative, snow, and atmospheric haze features in remotely sensed imagery to better reveal the underlying bedrock, as well as methods of analyzing digital elevation data, particularly for tectonic analysis. Dr. Crippen is currently a principal investigator for Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) and a member of the SRTM Real Time Science Team.