Deputy Director of the Space Research Institute National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and State Space Agency of Ukraine Professor Nataliia Kussul was awarded the Group of March Observation (GEO) Individual Excellence Award 2021, an honorary prize of the intergovernmental organization GEO (Group of Earth Observation) for the personal contribution to the activities of this organization.
The award ceremony took place during the GEO-17 Plenary week in November 2021 (watch the video of the award ceremony here). The GEO Individual Excellence Award was created in 2019 to recognise individuals who have demonstrated exceptional personal commitment to the mission and vision of GEO and whose work has had tangible impact.
Nataliia Kussul has made considerable contributions to the GEO Flagship Program GEOGLAM through extensive use of EO data and state-of-the-art computing technologies in developing new generation of agriculture monitoring products, including at national and regional scale, and playing a major role in adopting those products for the use by authorities in Ukraine and UN (through UN-SPIDER Program Support Office). She not only greatly contributed to the Earth Observation (EO) R&D domain by proposing new methods and technologies, e.g. based on deep learning, in utilizing EO data, but she led adoption of the developed geo-information products (e.g. land cover land use maps, SDG indicators) into the policies, as evidenced by ongoing collaborative efforts with Ministries and local authorities in Ukraine, such Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food of Ukraine, State Statistics Service of Ukraine, Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources of Ukraine.
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Space Research Institute National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and State Space Agency of Ukraine was established in April 1996 on the basis of Control Systems Department at the V.M.Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics of NAS of Ukraine.
The key areas:
- Solar and Terrestial Connections and Space Weather;
- Space Information Systems and Technologies, Aerospace Data Processing Technologies;
- Space Materials Science;
- Development of Advanced Instrumentations for Space Research;
- Theory and methods of Sophisticated Space Dynamic Systems.