Else Swinnen
Senior R&D Professional
Else Swinnen holds a PhD in Geography from the UCL Louvain, Belgium (Vegetation dynamics in Southern Africa from NOAA-AVHRR and SPOT-VGT time series) and a Masters degree in Applied Biological Sciences from KULeuven, Belgium. She started working for VITO in 1999 and is presently a senior Scientist in the Remote Sensing Unit, where she is R&D project manager of the Image Quality team focussing on the validation and improvement of remote sensing products.
Her research focus is on the definition of algorithms for the pre-processing of medium to low resolution sensors, the validation of various remote sensing products, the harmonization of time series from various low resolution sensors, and analysis of terrestrial ecosystem dynamics using time series of remotely sensed data.
She coordinates the image quality team supporting Terrascope and several CLMS, C3S and other service contracts. She is the Data Quality Manager in the global component of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (Lot1). As project manager she currently coordinates the ESA-funded CCI+ Vegetation Parameters project. She is currently a member of the ESA Advisory Committee for Earth Observation (ACEO), and of the Quality Working Group of PROBA-V. In the past she was co-lead of the CEOS LPV subgroup on vegetation indices, member of the Mission Performance Centre of Sentinel-3 and the Ad-Hoc Advisory Committee for Sentinel-2 Next Generation.
