Geosensing systems engineering and sciences is an interdisciplinary program focusing on the use of airborne mapping to meet the needs of private industry, government agencies and academic institutions. Graduate students will be trained to use a tool called LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging. With LiDAR, researchers fly a plane over an area they want to map, shooting hundreds of thousands of laser bursts per second at the ground. How that light returns to its source can be used to create extremely detailed topographical maps, even through dense vegetation and murky water. The maps produced from UH LiDAR data have supported hundreds of research projects for both private and government agencies. These maps have helped locate an ancient civilization in the Honduran rainforest, identify levees in danger of failing, chart land erosion following hurricanes, create flood maps for urban areas, find near-drought conditions in seemingly healthy plants, map the sea floor, chart areas prone to landslides and identify how the presence of life impacts geographical features. <br><br>The geosensing systems engineering and sciences program is the only graduate program of its kind in the world As the geospatial technology sector continues to grow, so does the demand for scientists who are trained to use technologies such as LiDAR. The graduate program in geosensing systems engineering at UH was established in direct response to industry workforce needs, and students are expected to prepare proposals for private and government agencies for financial support of their own research projects. Graduate students in the program have the advantage of working with and being taught by the world's leading experts on airborne laser mapping through the UH National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM). NCALM is funded by the National Science Foundation and is jointly operated with the University of California, Berkeley.<br><br>The Ph.D. degree requires 54 credit hours of approved study beyond the M.S. degree. These requirements translate to a minimum of 18 credit hours of organized course work (six 3-credit non-research courses) beyond the Master's Degree plus 36 hours of Ph.D. research, dissertation and unrestricted electives. After 100 hours, the student is no longer eligible for the lower, Texas-Resident Tuition.