Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics
Dr. Jasper Vrugt wins Young Outstanding Scientist Award
Dr. Jasper A. Vrugt, a guest researcher of the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics has been selected to receive the 2010 Outstanding Young Scientist Award from the European Geophysical Union (EGU).
Dr. Jasper A. Vrugt, a guest researcher of the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics has been selected to receive the 2010 Outstanding Young Scientist Award from the European Geophysical Union (EGU).
The Award recognizes young scientists who have made significant contributions to any field of geosciences within seven years of completing their Ph.D. degree. Vrugt has been cited for his seminal and highly cited contributions on the development of general-purpose algorithms and numerical approaches that aim to better extract information from the mismatch between model predictions and observations. The aim being to quantify individual error sources and improve theory, understanding and predictability of environmental systems. Vrugt has made significant contributions to four distinct disciplines: soil physics, parameter estimation (model calibration), uncertainty estimation (Bayesian statistics), and hydrology. He will receive the Outstanding Young Scientist Award during the General Assembly of the EGU, Vienna, Austria, May 2-7, 2010. In connection, Vrugt will give a Medal Lecture at this occasion, highlighting his research.
The Young Outstanding Scientist Award is one of several honours to be bestowed upon Jasper Vrugt in the last three years. Earlier in 2009 he was selected as one of The Netherlands' fifty most talented young people by the magazine Elsevier, while in 2007 he won the Dutch Hydrology Prize 2004-2007 for one of the scientific articles resulting from his PhD work. In that same year, he also received the Early Career Award for Soil Physics of the Soil Science Society of America (SSSA).
Dr. Vrugt completed his MSc and PhD studies with the Computational Geo-Ecology (CGE) group of the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (IBED) and graduated cum laude for both. Upon his graduation in 2004, Dr. Vrugt continued working for IBED as a PostDoc for a year before starting as Directors' Funded Postdoctoral Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States in 2005. A fellowship that was followed by the prestigious J. Robert Oppenheimer Postdoctoral Fellowship at the same institute in 2007. As Oppenheimer Postdoctoral Fellow, he is currently researching model diagnostics and evaluation problems in geophysics, atmospheric chemistry, and eco-hydrology. Jasper Vrugt continues to be connected to IBED as guest researcher. Together with his IBED colleagues he investigates amongst others bird migration patterns.