DLRWS: "DLR Woman Scientist of the Month" in September 2023
The DLR Women Scientists' Network has been awarding the Woman Scientist of the Month since November 2022. Maria Caamano Albuerne, a staff member at the Institute of Communication and Navigation, is the Scientist of the Month for September 2023. She has been working at the Institute of Communication and Navigation and in the research group "Visual and Terrestrial Augmentation" since May 2015.
This motivated Maria to start her PhD in 2017 as an external student at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Spain. The focus of her work is on early warning of anomalous ionospheric gradients by using a network of GNSS stations to detect and estimate them. In this way, GBAS facilities would not always have to protect against the worst ionospheric gradients ever observed in the region, which do not occur the vast majority of the time, but could instead use real information about the state of the ionosphere transmitted by the external network, which significantly increases system availability. Maria received an "Excellent Cum Laude" for her dissertation entitled "Network-Based Ionospheric Gradient Monitoring to Support Ground-Based Augmentation Systems" in July 2022.
For the definition of future GBAS architectures, Maria works closely with the international GBAS community in various working groups. In addition, she is responsible for the Institute's international collaboration with the Electronic Navigation Research Institute (ENRI) from Japan and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). She has also contributed greatly to the GBAS activities within the European SESAR 2020 PJ14 Wave 2 project. Since June 2023, she has been a member of the SARPS working group responsible for drafting the standards for the future DFMC-GBAS.
Maria is also an author and co-author of several journals and serves as a reviewer for the journal "Navigation", which is published by the US Institute of Navigation and is one of the most well-known journals in its field. She has presented her work at several international conferences and received the best presentation award at the ION GNSS+ 2017 and ION GNSS+ 2019 conferences. In May 2023, she was invited to give a talk on GBAS at Stanford University and to present her latest work at the Navigation Systems Panel (NSP) of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) in Montreal, Canada.
In her free time, Maria Caamano Albuerne likes to go to the mountains to do various sports such as trail running, hiking or skiing.
About the DLR Women Scientists' Network (DLRWS)
In February 2022, the "DLR Women Scientists' Network" was founded upon the initiative of two DLR women scientists. The aims of the network are to increase the proportion of women scientists at DLR, to make women experts visible and promote them for scientific conferences and, as the voice of DLR’s women scientists, to work out the levers at DLR so that DLR is seen as an attractive employer, especially for women. More than 360 women scientists have already joined the network.
KN Women Scientists
As early as 2020, the KN Women Scientists group was established at the Institute of Communications and Navigation to enable female scientists at the institute (~15% of DLR-KN staff) to network with each other and share common work experiences. The group reports regularly to the institute management and enjoys their full support in their projects.
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