Prof. Dr. Monika Sester

After studying Geodesy at Karlsruhe University, she worked as a research assistant at the Institutes of Photogrammetry of Karlsruhe and Stuttgart Universities. In 1994, she was made head of the research group "Geo-Informationssystems" at the Institute of Photogrammetry in Stuttgart. In 1995, she obtained her doctorate in engineering at Stuttgart University’s Faculty of Civil Engineering and Surveying on the subject of "Learning of structural models for image analysis". In 2000, Monika Sester received her Habilitation (postdoctoral qualification) with the topic "Scale-dependent depictions in digital spatial datasets”. That same year, she was granted the venia legendi (authorisation to teach) in the field of "Geo-Information Systems" and took up a professorship at the Institute of Cartography and Geoinformatics, Leibniz University Hannover.

Since then, Monika Sester has headed various national and international committees. For example, she has been chairperson of the Hannover section of the German Society for Cartography (DGfK) since 2002. From 2004 to 2016, she was director of various working groups of the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS). Since 2015, she is also vice-president of the International Cartographic Association. Monika Sester is a member of a variety of scientific organisations, such as the Braunschweigische Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft (Brunswick Scientific Society), and the acatech - the German National Academy of Science and Engineering. Since 2016, she is spokesperson of the research centre FZ:GEO along with Professor François Holtz, and, since 2018, chairperson of the DFG Senate Commission on Earth System Research. As from 2017, she was also a permanent member of the Helmholtz Senate Commission for the research field Earth and Environment, before becoming a member of the Helmholtz Association’s senate in 2018.