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 scientific support team of the PROBA-V processing centre, the ESA-funded projects PV-LAC and TerrA-P, she is the Service Manager and Science Coordinator of a data provision contract for the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), and Data Quality Manager in the Copernicus Global Land Service (Lot1). She is co-leader of the CEOS LPV subgroup on vegetation indices, member of the Quality Working Group of PROBA-V, and member of the Mission Performance Centre of Sentinel-3.