Didier Massonnet of the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales studied at the Ecole Polytechnique (Paris) and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Techniques Avancées (Paris), after which he spent a year at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He has worked on the design of synthetic aperture radar missions, playing a role in the developement of radar interferometric techniques. He has received several awards, including one from the French Academy of Sciences and the Appleton Prize. He is the author of several patents, notably the interferometric cartwheel. He is an IEEE fellow and an AGU member.