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CUE 2004

AEROSPACE ENGINEERING SCIENCES
Student Profile: Maria Belmonte Rivas

Maria Belmonte Rivas

If Maria Belmonte Rivas had her wish, she would see the world in all frequencies, from gamma rays to radio waves.

"Once, I visited a botanical garden near Munich and learned that butterflies can see in the ultraviolet region," she recalls. Bats, meanwhile, use sonar or echolocation to detect the tiniest of insects. In a nutshell, that's why remote sensing intrigues her. "There are so many things to see that are not being looked at," she says.

A first-year graduate student in Aerospace Engineering Sciences, Belmonte Rivas became interested in Global Positioning System (GPS) technology the first time she learned about it. "I was amazed by how complex and articulate the system was."

Through an internship at the European Space Agency in the Netherlands, she was able to do research in GPS reflections for three years before coming to CU-Boulder. Before that, she studied physics in her native country, Spain.

Now she works with Associate Professor Penina Axelrad on GPS reflections for remote sensing, a field with potential applications in altimetry, ocean wind retrieval, and land moisture or sea ice characterization.

While it's too early now to say what her future will bring, Belmonte Rivas says she is driven primarily by a quest for knowledge. She initially chose physics as her field of study because "The workings of matter excited me. I just wanted to know."