Veronique M. Dehant
Royal Observatory of Belgium
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Primary Section: 16, Geophysics Membership Type:
International Member
(elected 2023)
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Biosketch
Véronique Dehant works at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, where she is responsible for the Operational Directorate "Reference Systems and Planetology". She is also Extraordinary Professor at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCLouvain). She is an Academician (Member of the Royal Academy of Belgium, Science Class) since 2010, Foreign Member of the Paris Academy of Sciences since 2016 and has been awarded several prizes including the Descartes Prize of the European Union in 2003 and the De Leeuw-Damry-Bourlart Prize, Prize in Fundamental Exact Sciences among the five FNRS research excellence prizes, in 2020. In 2015, she obtained an ERC Advanced Grant from the European Research Council for her project RotaNut: Rotation and Nutation of a wobbly Earth; and in 2019, an ERC Synergy Grant for her project GRACEFUL (GRavimetry, mAgnetism, rotation, and CorE FLow). She is involved in processing data from instruments in several space missions, in particular of the RISE experiment (Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment) on board the InSight mission (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) currently on the surface of Mars. She is working on a new ESA mission, GENESIS, that will revolutionize reference frame precision and improve climate change and positioning results.
Research Interests
Influence of the Earth's internal structure, free oscillations, internal convection, rheology, and external fluids (atmosphere and oceans) on the Earth's rotation and deformation in order to improve the precession-nutation model and the realization of the terrestrial and celestial reference frames, and in order to better understand the physics of the Earth’s interior (in the Earth’s core in particular). The same research is being applied to the planet Mars (where she also proposes a radio-science experiment), Venus, Mercury, and the icy satellites.
