Fanny Brun receives the International Glaciological Society (IGS) Early Career Scientist award

Article initially published on the IGS website

The IGS Early Career Scientist Award is given in recognition of significant scientific and/or community contributions to Glaciology by an Early Career Scientist.

Dr. Brun (Institute of Environmental Geosciences) is a talented scientist who has already made outstanding contributions to our understanding of the evolution of Earth’s glaciers.

Dr. Brun’s PhD thesis focused on the influence of debris on the mass balance of High Mountain Asia glaciers using a multi-scale approach. Dr. Brun studied the relationship between glacier mass change and lake changes over the Tibetan Plateau as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Utrecht, and has continued her research activities in High Mountain Asia since being hired by the Research Institute for Development in Grenoble.

In a short time, Dr. Brun has become one of the pioneers in research on debris-covered glaciers in Asia and has demonstrated impressive abilities in remote sensing. Dr. Brun’s work includes studies that span a spectrum of scales, ranging from the local scale (using terrestrial photography and drones), to regional scales (using a variety of satellite images). This scope has led to significant advances in our understanding of glaciers in remote environments. For example, Dr. Brun was able to create high resolution mass balances for thousands of individual glaciers using a vast amount of digital elevation model data, providing detailed insights into the spatial heterogeneity of glacier response to climate in High Mountain Asia.

Dr. Brun has also been involved in the collection of field observations and glacier mass and energy balance modeling and has been instrumental in developing new state-of-the-art methods to process satellite imagery.

Dr. Brun has also demonstrated a strong commitment to service within the glaciological community, serving as co-chair of the Regional Assessment of Glacier Mass Change working group of the International Association of Cryospheric Sciences and serving on the scientific advisory board of the Glacier Mass Balance Intercomparison Experiment. Dr. Burn served as Scientific Editor for Frontiers in Earth Sciences and Journal of Glaciology and has recently been chosen to be a lead author for the Hindu Kush Himalaya second assessment report about mountains and population coordinated by ICIMOD (Nepal).

Dr. Brun’s contributions to our understanding of glaciers and service to the community have been significant, and model an outstanding commitment to both research and service within the glaciological community worthy of recognition.

On behalf of the Awards Committee of the International Glaciological Society
Jeremy Bassis, Chair.

More info about this prize : https://www.igsoc.org/about/awards/early-career-scientist-award