René Garello was born in 1953. He received the Ph.D. degree in Signal Processing at the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble (INPG) in 1981. From 1982 to 1984 he worked as a Research Associate at Aeronomy Lab, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) at Boulder, Colorado (USA). He joined the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de Bretagne (Telecom Bretagne), Brest, France in 1985. In 1988 he became Professor in this engineering school in the field of signal processing and image processing and in 1995, Prof. Garello obtained his Habilitation (HDR; Habilitation to Supervise Research).

His main research interests lie in Remote Sensing, 2D signal processing, statistical and spectral analysis applied to ocean surface features detection and characterization. For the last two decades, he has work in the development of signal and image processing tools for the interpretation of radar signals and the extraction of sea surface features, either natural (wind, waves, currents) or manmade (ships, pollution). These application fields were supported by several European projects and industrial contracts.

Prof. Garello was an elected IEEE OES (Oceanic Engineering Society) AdCom member from 1999 to 2001, from 2003 to 2005 and in 2005 for a new three year term. In the beginning of 2001, he headed the Committee on Conference Policies (CoCoPo) which was in charge of defining a new set of Conference Policies and Procedures in order to insure continuity between the successive OCEANS conferences. This committee defined several new approaches and came up with the concept of two Oceans-a-year (every year in Northern America, every other odd year in Europe and every other even year in Asia-Pacific). In order to implement this plan a new committee was formed: the Joint Oceans Advisory Board or JOAB, of which Prof. Garello is the co-chair.

Prof. Garello was the General Chairman of the first OCEANS of the new Two-Oceans-a-year concept: OCEANS’05 held in Brest, France in June 2005. In 2005, he was elected Vice-President Conference Operations and then re-elected in 2006 and 2008. He was elevated to the grade of Fellow of the IEEE, class of 2006, “for contributions to signal processing applied to remote sensing of the ocean”. He received the OES Service Awards in 2006 for developing and implementing the two OCEANS conference policy.
Prof. Garello has authored or co-authored more than 40 papers, a hundred conference communications and three books.