Geography Ph.D. student selected for prestigious ASPRS Fellowship

Chintan Maniyar, doctoral student in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences department of geography and a NASA FINESST Fellow, has been selected to receive the Robert N. Colwell Memorial Fellowship from the American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS).

The award amount of $10K is to designed encourage and commend graduate students at the Ph.D. level who display exceptional interest, desire, ability, and aptitude in the field of remote sensing or other related geospatial information technologies, and who have a special interest in developing practical uses of these technologies.

Maniyar's Ph.D. research focuses on advancing monitoring and early warning of Cyanobacterial Harmful Algal Blooms. His work spans from developing low-cost radiometer systems to field sampling, wet lab analyses and building physics-based AI models to predict public health risk of CyanoHABs using multi-satellite data. 

"Operationalizing this research is big priority for me, which I do through the CyanoTRACKER project, and building user-ready dashboards that help with water quality decision making," Maniyar said.

"Working at UGA-Geography is fantastic – I am really appreciative of all the resources, support and mentoring from my amazing colleagues, office staff, and especially my Ph.D. advisor, Dr. Deepak Mishra. As I draw close to wrapping up my Ph.D. here, I look forward to expanding my water quality research towards geo-foundation models, phytoplankton community composition and wet carbon dynamics in my next role." 

"ASPRS awards the prestigious Colwell Memorial Fellowship to a graduate student who has demonstrated exceptional ability and aptitude in remote sensing research, and Chintan is just such a student," said Deepak Mishra, Merle C. Prunty, Jr. Professor and head of the department of geography. "His exceptional ability to develop physics-informed AI/ML remote sensing models to monitor and study harmful algal blooms in global inland waters places him as a leading student researcher in the field of aquatic remote sensing."

Maniyar will be honored along with other award winners at the ASPRS 2025 Annual Meeting in Denver in February 2026.

Image: Chintan Maniyar (submitted photo).