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EGU Award Ceremony (Credit: EGU/Foto Pfluegl)

Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Awards 2025 Matthias Schartner

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Matthias Schartner

Matthias Schartner
Matthias Schartner

G Geodesy

The 2025 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is awarded to Matthias Schartner for commendable efforts to modernize one of the fundamental pillars of geodesy – Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI).

Matthias Schartner is a world-leading expert in planning and optimizing the observations of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), one of the fundamental observation techniques in geodesy. VLBI measurements are essential for the establishment of global reference frames, which are required to refine our knowledge of Earth's dynamics, tectonic movements, sea-level changes, and contribute significantly to global navigation, climate studies, and space exploration.

Since the beginning of VLBI, almost all geodetic VLBI experiments have been scheduled using the same software package developed by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center VLBI group. Schartner succeeded in developing the next generation VLBI scheduling software "VieSched++" using new and innovative algorithms to better plan the measurement sessions His approach has led to much better VLBI observations and is nowadays used operationally worldwide, which is a remarkable achievement. Within the International VLBI Service for Geodesy and Astrometry (IVS), over half of the observing programs are now utilising his software, totalling around 500 VLBI experiments To manage this huge workload and responsibility, he founded an IVS Operation Center together with partners from Germany and Austria. Furthermore, he developed, for the first time, a fully automated scheduling optimization pipeline that is driven by novel evolutionary algorithms. His optimization of VLBI Intensive sessions improved the UT1-UTC difference estimate by up to 50 percent and more than doubled the number of observations recorded by the VLBI Global Observing System (VGOS) - as documented in his excellent research record. Furthermore, and equally important, his developments set the foundation for studying and observing satellites with the VLBI technique. This will especially be relevant for the upcoming Genesis mission by ESA, which will be the first to provide a unique set co-located geodetic observations in space.

In addition to his excellent research track record, Matthias Schartner has made strong contributions to the geodetic community. Not only has he embraced an open science mentality by distributing his VLBI scheduling software on Github, but he is also an active member of international science boards, such as the VGOS Technical Committee (VTC).