Tonie van Dam

Tonie Marie van Dam (born April 19, 1960) is an American geophysicist and geodesist, known for her pioneering research on solid Earth deformations due to loads from atmospheric and hydrologic pressures. She and her collaborators used space geodetic observations and modeling for increased precision in measuring and understanding such loads.

Biography
Tonie van Dam graduated in 1982 with a B.S. in physics and geology from Mary Washington College (now renamed the University of Mary Washington). At the University of Colorado Boulder, she graduated in 1991 with a Ph.D. in geophysics. Her Ph.D. thesis Atmospheric Load Response of the Solid Earth and Oceans was supervised by John M. Wahr. From 1991 to 1993 she was a postdoc at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). From 1993 to 2000 she worked for the U.S. civil service as a research geophysicist at the Geosciences Laboratory of the National Geodetic Survey (part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). In the Faculté des Sciences, de la Technologie et de la Communication at the University of Luxembourg, she was an associate professor from 2006 to 2013 and a full professor from 2013 to 2019. (In language skills, she has functional ability in French and basic skills in both Luxembourgish and Spanish.) In 2020 she was appointed to a full professorship in the University of Utah's Department of Geology and Geophysics.

Van Dam is the author or coauthor of more than 120 publications. Her research focuses on the geodesy and geophysics of loads from atmospheric and hydrologic pressures. Her 2001 article Crustal displacements due to continental water loading (written with six collaborators, including John M. Wahr, Geoffrey Blewitt, and Kristine M. Larson) is considered a classic in geodesy. Van Dam has served the community of geophysicists and geodesist in several capacities and since 2019 is a member of the board of directors of UNAVCO. She is an associate editor for the Institute of Geophysics of the Czech Academy of Sciences's Studia Geophysica et Geodaetica from 2010 to the present and for the International Association of Geodesy's Journal of Geodesy from 2015 to the present.

In 2017 van Dam was awarded Luxembourg's Grand Prix en Sciences de l’Institut Grand-ducal, Science Geologiques/Prix Feidt. The American Geophysical Union (AGU) in 2017 appointed her the Bowie Lecturer and in 2020 elected her a Fellow of the AGU. She received in 2019 the European Geosciences Union’s Vening Meinesz Medal.

Selected publications

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 * (See GRACE and GRACE-FO.)
 * (See GRACE and GRACE-FO.)