Sindy Sterckx
Senior R&D Professional
After graduating from KU Leuven with a degree in Bio-Engineering in 1999, Sindy Sterckx began her career as a Research Associate before joining the VITO Remote Sensing Unit in 2001. With over 20 years of experience in Earth Observation, Sindy has developed expertise in radiometric calibration of optical airborne and spaceborne instruments, radiative transfer modeling, atmospheric correction, imaging spectroscopy, remote sensing of water quality, including marine plastics.
A first step to achieve high quality output is to have high quality input data.
She led the radiometric Image Quality Center (IQC) of the PROBA-V satellite mission and contributed to the validation of OLCI radiometry as part of the Expert Support Laboratories (ESL) of the Sentinel-3 Mission Performance Center. Sindy is also involved in the upcoming FLuorescence Explorer (FLEX) mission and the Copernicus Hyperspectral Imaging (CHIME) mission, focusing on defining the vicarious radiometric calibration approach and algorithms. She is currently working on the CalibrEO service for SmallSats.
She has been a guest professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), teaching a course on “In-situ and Remote Sensing.” Sindy has also been active in various scientific committees, advisory boards, and working groups, including the TRUTHS Mission Advisory Group (MAG), the Sentinel-3 Next Generation Optical/IR mission Ad Hoc Expert Group (S3NGO-AHEG), the European Space Sciences Committee (ESSC), and the FutureEO Independent Science Review (ISR) panel. Additionally, she served as the General Chair of WHISPERS 2023 and Technical Programme Chair of IGARSS 2021.
