ITC PhD Publication Award 2025 Ceremony

Recently, the Faculty ITC celebrated outstanding scientific contributions during the ITC PhD Publication Award 2025 ceremony. The event was presented by ITC board member Jaap Zevenbergen while Martin van Maarseveen handed over the cheque and flowers to the winner.

This year’s award attracted five nominees. The winner of the 2025 edition is Konstantin Maslov (from ITC's EOS department), recognized for his innovative research on global glacier mapping. His paper introduces Glacier-VisionTransformer-U-Net (GlaViTU), a deep learning model that combines convolutional and transformer architectures to map glaciers worldwide using open satellite imagery. The study demonstrates expert-level accuracy, supporting climate change research and global monitoring efforts.

I am very grateful to all involved in the process of the preparation of the paper as well as publishing it. Those, of course, include my supervision team and three reviewers, whose judgment and suggestions dramatically increased the quality of the initially submitted manuscript, particularly in the aspects of presentation and additional validation of our results.

Reference: Globally scalable glacier mapping by deep learning matches expert delineation accuracy (2025). Nature communications, 16(1). Article 43. Maslov, K. A., Persello, C., Schellenberger, T. & Stein, A. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-54956-x

Other nominees in 2025

The shared second place is for Vidya Nahdhiyatul Fikriyah and Rui Xie (both NRS). Rui was also nominated last year and climbed to second place this time. Mateo Moreno Zapata (AES) and Vidit Kundu (PGM) were the other nominees.

About the PhD award

The ITC PhD Publication Award is an annual recognition for PhD candidates who are the first authors of outstanding scientific publications. The prize includes an award certificate and €1000. A jury of professors and a PhD candidate evaluate the publications based on presentation, innovation, scientific rigor, practical/scientific relevance, and readability.