UAS Flight Team

Lee Hathcock, M.S.

Lee has 11 years of research experience with Geosystems Research Institute (GRI). Lee has been working with unmanned aerial systems (UAS) for eight years, involved in piloting multiple UAS platforms, mission planning, interfacing with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), programming support, and flight imagery processing. This includes research in the lower Pearl River watershed to improve river models for flood extent and precision agriculture surveys for researchers at Mississippi State University. Prior projects have included work on hyperspectral camera calibration routines, hurricane debris models, data handling for a land cover classification project, cross-correlation of DMC satellite data and MODIS satellite data to obtain surface reflectance products, and research on satellite sensor networks. Lee was the recipient of the 2013 Research Support Award for Mississippi State University Centers and Institutes. He is a member of IEEE and Eta Kappa Nu.

Daniel McCraine, M.S.

Daniel has 4 years of research experience in digital image analysis and feature extraction. Daniel earned his B.S. and M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Mississippi State University in 2018 and 2020 respectively. Following graduation in May 2020 he started working full time with the Geosystems Research Institute. He has been involved with developing algorithms to detect crop stand counts at emergence, detect and measure stumps after logging operations, and to detect potential hazards in powerline easements from neighboring trees. More recently he has been heavily involved in UAS mounted LiDAR and Hyperspectral data collection, processing, and classification.

Jessica Simmerman Wolfe, M.S.

Jessica is a Part 107 remote pilot involved in piloting UAS platforms. Jessica received her bachelor's degree in Agricultural Engineering Technology and Business in 2019 and her master's degree in Engineering Technology in 2021 from Mississippi State University. She joined the Geosystems Research Institute in 2021 as a Research Associate II.

Sean Carpenter

Sean has 2 years of experience piloting UAV's as an FAA-licensed Part 107 Unmanned Aircraft Pilot. He graduated from Mississippi State University in 2020 with a bachelor's degree in Agricultural Engineering with a concentration in Surveying and Geomatics.