Josep Closa Soteras
- SAR systems engineer

Josep speaks Catalan, Spanish, English and Italian and uses his languages to maintain contacts with colleagues all over the world. He lives in Barcelona, but has travelled widely. He was able to work on the development of the Synthetic Aperture Radar processor while he was still at university, then went to ESRIN, where he spent five years, first as a Young Graduate Trainee and then as a contractor.

He is now a SAR systems engineer at Altamira Information, a company that specialises in the analysis and processing of images from space. He participated in the commissioning of the SAR ground processor that generates the end products derived from geophysical measurements obtained by satellite instruments. These products give users additional information, for instance about land deformation or displacement.

Currently, he is working on applications derived from SAR data, such as oil-spill surveillance, wind speed measurement, or small-displacement detection, for example for the evaluation of subsidence in the construction of a new subway line in Barcelona.

He has always liked satellites and took full advantage of opportunities to work with them at university. He is well aware that the projects he is involved in are so big that they have to be multinational and recommends an international education which brings with it all the benefits entailed from operating in a variety of languages with people from different cultures and different ways of working.