People
Dr. Didier Fussen
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Miscellaneous Information
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Senior Scientist
Research Expertise and Interests:
Inverse problems, remote sensing, radiative transfer and machine learning.
Education:
Master’s Degree in Physics, UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, June 1988
PhD in Physics, UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, February 1993
PhD Thesis Title: “A new approach to the dynamics of charge transfer reactions in the hydrogen system H-H”Short Biography:
Dr. Didier Fussen, former Head of the Solar Radiations in Atmospheres Department, led the Limb Remote Sensing group at the Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy (BISA) until his statutory retirement as a permanent staff member in December 2021.
He joined this federal scientific institute in 1988, following a PhD in Atomic Collision Physics at the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL), where he developed expertise in low-energy atomic collision experiments and theoretical methods in applied quantum mechanics.
At BISA, he initially worked in the mass spectrometry group before taking charge of data processing for the ORA mission—the first Sun occultation radiometer developed at BISA for ESA’s EURECA platform.
He founded a small research group that evolved into an ESA Expert Support Laboratory for the GOMOS mission on ENVISAT and also became a member of the ACE-MAESTRO Science Team.
In 2005, he proposed the ALTIUS instrument for an ESA Earth Watch mission, a microsatellite-based limb imager operating in the UV-VIS-NIR spectral domains. He also led the PICASSO CubeSat mission and proposed its VISION spectral imager.Dr. Fussen has served on both the Board of Directors and the Scientific Council of BISA. He was also an invited professor at UCL for many years, where he taught atomic collision physics and atmospheric remote sensing.
Since 2022, he holds a part-time research position, primarily focused on the ALTIUS mission and inverse problems in atmospheric physics.He is the author or co-author of 29 first-author and 92 co-authored papers in peer-reviewed international scientific journals, and has contributed to approximately 40 scientific projects.
