Piotr W. Sobieski (S'70-M'85) was born in Belgium in 1948. He received the degrees in electrical engineering in 1971, the Ph.D. degree in 1977, and Habilitation in 1987 from the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL), Belgium.
He is presently Professor at UCL (Laboratoire de Télécommunications et Télédétection), where he teaches fundamental electricity, telecommunications, and microwave remote sensing. Since 1995, he has been the head of the Department of Electrical Engineering. Between 1971 and 1980, he was involved in propagation of microwaves through the atmosphere, particularly attenuation and depolarization of microwaves by hydrometeors. From 1980 to 1981, he stayed at the Technical Center (ESTEC) of the European Space Agency, The Netherlands, where his activities dealt with inverse scattering problems in microwave remote sensing. Between 1981 and 1990, his main research activities concerned a unified approach of passive and active measurements, the development and validation of theoretical and numerical electromagnetic scattering models for the sea and the atmosphere, and synergic inversion of field data. From 1990 to 1991, he was a visiting Scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where he worked on problems related to microwave remote sensing of rain above the ocean from space. Since 1991, he has worked at UCL on various remote sensing problems in cooperation with NASA (USA), ESA (NL), CETP (F), IMST (F), Ifremer (F), and other European laboratories.