Jie ZHAO worked on large-scale flood mapping using SAR data from 2017, as a joint Ph.D. student between the TU Wien and the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology. During her Ph.D. study, she proposed an automatic method for large-scale flood mapping focusing on bare soils and sparsely vegetated regions and a deep learning-based flood mapping method focusing on flooded urban areas. Besides the flood maps generated by SAR data, the areas where SAR is unable to identify floods or not have also been delineated. According to her performance in her Ph.D. study, she has been granted the ‘2021 Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed Students Abroad’ by the Chinese Scholarship Council. This award, starting in 2013, was founded for the purpose of rewarding the academic excellence of self-financed Chinese students overseas and no more than 650 young talents can be granted the award each year all over the world.