Rebecca Bosworth, a 2023 graduate of the M.S. in Geographic Information Science and Technology (GIST) in the USC Spatial Sciences Institute, is the 2023 Government Services Scholarship recipient from the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS).

For her M.S. GIST masters thesis, Bosworth evaluated the suitability of freely accessible medium-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Sentinel-1 satellite versus expensive very high-resolution (VHR) optical imagery for the purpose of detecting war-induced building damage in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, which was seized by Russia in May 2022. Her study assessed building damage using backscatter intensity changes between images over time and concluded that detected damage in conjunction with reports of civilian casualties may indicate potential violations of international humanitarian law.

Bosworth was part of a team of M.S. GIST students whose poster one the 2022 Esri Student Poster Competition category for the most suitability applied methodology or analysis at the 2022 Los Angeles Geospatial Summit.