Dr Omar Mohamed

Dr Omar Mohamed is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Agri-Food Economics & Marketing within the School of Agriculture, Policy and Development at the University of Reading. His research focuses on applying data science, Earth observation, spatial analysis and environmental modelling to investigate sustainable land-use systems, soil health, biomass production and agricultural productivity.

Omar has an interdisciplinary background in soil and water sciences, geoinformation science and environmental modelling. His research combines satellite Earth observation, geospatial analysis, process-based modelling and data-driven approaches to understand agricultural and environmental systems. He has experience working with optical and radar satellite data, including Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2, and with large, spatially and temporally structured environmental datasets.

At the University of Reading, Omar contributes to the Horizon Europe SOILBIOMASS+ project, focusing on soil-health and biomass indicators, land-management practices, land-suitability assessment and land-use scenario modelling. His work involves developing reproducible data-science and AI-assisted workflows, structured indicator and practice catalogues, scenario datasets and geospatial inputs to support land-use assessment and decision-making.

Before joining the University of Reading, Omar was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Southampton, where he contributed to several Earth observation and environmental research programmes, including EOCIS, EOCrop, EODH and TRUTHS. His work included the development of Earth observation products for vegetation monitoring, including leaf area index (LAI) and fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (fAPAR), satellite-based environmental monitoring, data integration and gap-filling, and the development of reproducible workflows for large-scale geospatial datasets. He also contributed to research involving crop and land-surface modelling, soil moisture and agricultural monitoring, and worked with national and international academic and technical partners.

Omar holds a PhD in Geo-information Science and Earth Observation for Water Resources and Environmental Management from the University of Twente, The Netherlands, an MSc in Physical Land Resources from Ghent University, Belgium and a BSc in Soil and Water Sciences from Cairo University, Egypt.