Ylona van Dinther receives KNAW Early Career Award

Geophysicist dr Ylona van Dinther was awarded with the Early Career Award of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). This award is meant for young scientists capable of developing original and enlightening research ideas. Van Dinther receives this award for her groundbreaking research that opened a new research direction in geophysics.

Ylona van Dinther is Assistant Professor in seismotectonics and earthquake mechanics at the Department of Earth Sciences, Utrecht University. Her research combines the fields of geodynamics and seismology to better understand why, where and when earthquakes and tsunami’s will occur to adequately prepare society and ensure a sustainable future. Van Dinther was senior scientist and lecturer at ETH Zurich (Switzerland) leading a group of six PhD students and one post doc before returning to Utrecht in 2018. The jury praises her developments and applications of multi-scale numerical models, which simulate both tectonic and seismicity processes to understand and quantify risks of natural and induced seismicity and tsunami’s. In 2018 her research that pushed the community into this big challenges direction was awarded with the Jason Morgan Early Career Award from the Tectonophysics section of the American Geophysical Union.

Foto van Ylona van Dinther

Honoured
Ylona van Dinther is deeply honoured and delighted to receive one out of three KNAW Early Career Awards in the domain of Natural Sciences and Engineering. She is grateful to receive such recognition for the quality, novelty and impact of her research. She looks forward to further exploring the solid Earth’s intriguing secrets for the benefit of science and society.

Building bridges
The numerical models Van Dinther and her group developed bridged two previously separate communities, which now work more together to tackle challenging and important problems. Van Dinther does not only have the ability to generate and demonstrate novel research ideas, but also to further develop them through (co-)raising about 2.4 million euro’s of funding for her group. More recently, she demonstrated the concept of applying weather forecasting techniques to estimate fault stresses and forecast earthquake recurrences. She received funding from NWO’s DeepNL to test this idea on laboratory experiments and better understand induced earthquakes in Groningen. That her vision and the quality of her work are internationally much appreciated is apparent from an exceptional number of thirty invitations to speak at prominent international occasions and her role as Associate Editor at the highly respect Journal of Geophysical Research. She recently published an article on the influence of the thickness of sediment deposits on larger earthquakes.

Overzicht van het onderzoek van Ylona van Dinther

Academic career and a family
The jury also praises her lectures on how to combine two ambitious careers and a family for the benefit of developing policies and inspiring young (prospective) researchers. Thus emphasizing her position as a role model for young (female) researchers.

Early Career Award
Twelve young researchers, three from each of KNAW's four Academy domains, will receive a KNAW Early Career Award. The Award consists of a sum of 15,000 euros and a work of art and is intended for researchers in the Netherlands who are at the beginning of their careers and have innovative, original research ideas. The KNAW Early Career Award will be awarded for the second time this year.