Tanja Van Achteren has a Master degree (1997) and PhD (2004) in Electrotechnical Engineering from the KULeuven, Leuven, Belgium. Her Master thesis was performed at the Laboratoire d’Analyse et Systèmes (LAAS-CNRS), Toulouse, France in the ERASMUS student exchange program. She continued working as a senior researcher and training coordinator at Imec on the design and development of electronic system design methodologies for battery-friendly execution of multimedia applications on hand-held devices.

Imagination is at the start of every innovation. Remote sensing technology is evolving at light speed and is living up to its potential in every imaginable application domain.

In March 2006 she joined the Flemish Institute for Technological Research (VITO) as a system engineer for the Medusa project, an ultra light weight camera system for a stratospheric unmanned aerial vehicle. In July 2008 she became Project Manager for the Proba-V User Segment development, responsible for the processing, calibration/validation, archiving and distribution of end-user data products for global vegetation monitoring. From September 2009, she took the role of Principal Investigator of the Proba-V mission, monitoring the end-to-end system performance and image quality during the development phase.