Sabine Chabrillat became a professor at Leibniz University Hannover on August 1, 2021. The appointment is joint with the German Research Centre for Geosciences, where she will continue to perform research duties. Sabine Chabrillat will hold the chair for "Digital Soil Mapping" at the Faculty of Natural Sciences in the Institute of Soil Science.

Sabine Chabrillat has been a research associate at the German Research Center for Geosciences since 2001. She has been head of the spectroscopy laboratory since 2006 and took over the leadership of the working group " Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Applications" in Section 1.4 'Remote Sensing and Geoinformatics' in 2014. Stages of her professional career include activities at the Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées in Toulouse (France) and at the Center for the Study of Earth from Space at the University of Colorado in the USA.

Chabrillat studied astrophysics, geophysics, and space technics at Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, and completed a PhD in spectral geology on lithological discrimination of a peridotite massif using visible-infrared airborne imaging spectroscopy (AVIRIS data).

In her research, Sabine Chabrillat is intensively involved in soil spectroscopy as well as NIR (near infrared), SWIR (shortwave infrared), and thermal imaging spectroscopy for geoscientific and environmental applications. She improves hyperspectral remote sensing methods with the goal, inter alia, of more accurately quantifying soil variables and surface properties in arid and agricultural regions. In particular, the detection and quantification of soil erosion and degradation processes play a role in this context.

Sabine Chabrillat is also the Principal Investigator for the hyperspectral satellite mission EnMAP (Environmental Mapping Analysis Program) planned for 2022, coordinator of the EnMAP Science Advisory Group and the EnMAP project consortium. By EnMAP, she is providing scientific support to DLR space management as well as the ground segment with algorithms and science developments. A personal focus is placed on soil and drylands surface processes and researching the linkage of different methods. How can a wide variety of scales, i.e. laboratory measurements, field campaigns and hyperspectral image processing be well linked? How can we uplink soil databases with satellite data? In this frame she is co-chair of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Working Group "Standards and protocols for soil spectroscopy" (P4005) looking at the development of soil multiscale data.