Farouk El-Baz is a research professor in the Department of Archaeology and of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University, where he also directs the Center for Remote Sensing. He served on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) committee that selected landing sites for the Apollo lunar missions and trained the astronauts in observation and photography. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and an adjunct professor of geology in the Faculty of Science at Ain Shams University in Cairo.

Writing in the Cairo Review