Dr. Séverine Robert has an interdisciplinary background. After a PhD in infrared spectroscopy, she spent 11 years at BIRA-IASB working on Mars, Venus and now Jupiter’s planetary atmospheres. Since May 2020, she works part-time at the Institute of Condensed Matter and Nanosciences, UCLouvain and part-time in the Planetary Atmospheres Research Unit at BIRA-IASB, in the frame of a FED-tWin research position.
Since 2009, Dr. S. Robert has participated in several planetary missions to Venus, Jupiter and Mars. She has participated in the science phases of SOIR onboard Venus Express and NOMAD onboard ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (EMTGO), as a Co-Investigator. Her main involvement lies in the preparatory phases of instruments' developments. Bearing in mind the global picture of a mission and its development, S. Robert is responsible for assessing the expected performances of any instrument in development, being aware of the state-of-the-art techniques, models, and tools, enabling the exploration of Mars with NOMAD /EMTGO, Venus with VenSpec-H /EnVision or Jupiter and its moons with MAJIS /JUICE. Her recent position in UCLouvain opened up new perspectives. Developing experimental setups to improve our interpretation of planetary data is an asset complementing neatly her research activities. During the science phases of the remote instruments, S. Robert uses radiative transfer modeling tools to analyze the spectra obtained in situ.
She has been involved in several BIRA-IASB national and international projects for which she has been responsible for specific tasks and/or coordinating work packages. She also acted as Project Manager of the VenSpec-H instrument at BIRA-IASB from November 2018 until April 2020. She is now the Instrument Scientist of VenSpec-H. She is also contributing to the ARIEL science team, an exoplanetary mission. In particular, she is involved in the ARIEL working groups: "Synergies with Solar System", “Spectral Retrievals” and “Molecular opacities”. Last but not least she was elected in 2018 to be the Belgian representative at the European Astrobiology Network Association(EANA) board and since 2020, she is the secretary of the EuroPlanet Society BeNeLux hub.
S. Robert is part of the outreach team of BIRA-IASB and regularly presents the scientific outputs of planetary mission to general audiences. She was invited to press events related to the Venus’ transit in 2012 and to the launch of ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter in 2016. More recently, she participated to the radio show “Les Eclaireurs” on La Première in April 2019 and gave a plenary conference at “Fête de la Science” for the Planetarium de Saint-Omer (France) in October 2019. On the occasion of Perseverance’s landing, in February 2021, she was invited for a pre-recorded interview by the Armand Pien Observatory and to the live show “Les visiteurs du soir” on the TV channel LN24.
