Batu holds a B.Sc. in telecommunications engineering and a Ph.D. in synthetic aperture radar interferometry time-series analysis. His dissertation was selected to be the most original research, and he is the winner of the University of Miami Rosenstiel School F.G. Walton Smith Prize for 2012. . He worked on glacier remote sensing as a Post-Doc at the University of Alaska Fairbanks between 2011 and 2013. His primary area of expertise is radar remote sensing, and he has worked on applications for observing surface deformation, measuring target velocities, boosting signal-to-noise ratio in target detection algorithms, and radar design and instrumentation.
Since 2013 he has been working at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He has been working on the instrument and algorithm development of P-, L-, X- and Ku-band synthetic aperture radar systems. He is the recipient of the 2015 NASA Goddard Heliophysics and Biospheric Sciences Award and the 2020 NASA Early Career Achievement Medal (ECAM) for his contributions.
He is a member of the IEEE and American Geophysical Union, chairs the Microwave Remote Sensing working group under International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote-Sensing Technical Commission III. He is the principal investigator for the Snow Water Equivalent SAR and Radiometer (SWESARR). He serves as one of the NISAR Deputy Application Leads, candidate architecture and architecture assessment deputy lead for Surface Deformation and Change mission study, and one of the Disasters Program coordinators at GSFC. He is a subject matter expert for the NASA Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisition Program, and is the stakeholder engagement program lead for the Observational Products for End-Users from Remote Sensing Analysis (OPERA) project. He contributed to the Surface Topography and Vegetation Incubation Study team report. He is working on several radar remote sensing projects on various topics such as surface deformation, snow water equivalent, flood and topography mapping at NASA.