Dr. Thomas Pingel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Binghamton University where he directs the Near Earth Imaging Lab. Dr. Pingel earned his Ph.D. from and completed a post-doc at the Geography Department at the University of California Santa Barbara. He is a past-president of the Cartography and Geographic Information Society and the AAG Cartography Specialty Group, and is a Cartographic Editor for the Journal of Maps.

Dr. Pingel's research interests broadly include Geographic Information Science, Geovisualization, Remote Sensing, Geocomputation, and Spatial Analysis. Most of his work these days focuses on point cloud processing and visualization - both lidar and UAV-derived Structure from Motion (SfM). He is the author of the Simple Morphological Filter (SMRF), the ground filtering algorithm used in PDAL and for the Microsoft Planetary Computer hosted 3DEP digital terrain models (DTMs).

Other projects include indoor mapping and lidar perception, thermal imaging and the urban heat island effect, the development of 3D printed terrain maps and augmented reality interfaces, VR-immersive lidar classification systems, machine and deep learning approaches to classification, geomorphometry, and terrain-based least-cost path analysis. His work has been applied to problems in climate change, forestry, hazards, public health, hydrology, and archaeology.

Dr. Pingel teaches courses in world regional geography, geospatial programming in Python, geovisualization, spatial analysis, advanced topics in remote sensing, and terrain analysis, and hosts undergraduate and graduate student researchers in the Near Earth Imaging Lab.