Norman Kerle

'Just one month before the Wall fell in October 1989 I was drafted for my compulsory military service. The rule in East Germany was, if you want to go to university, first you do something for your country. Young men were supposed to serve for three or even four years. Because of the unusual circumstances I only served for about 13 months. I then moved to Hamburg with my family and immediately left to spend a year in the US and enjoy my new-found freedom. Upon my return I started my university career in Hamburg as a Geography student. After three and a half years I went back to the US and did my Master's there. To me, the beauty of geography is that it's all about human-environment interaction. This not only makes it interesting but also relevant, because it means that you can combine work on natural phenomena or technical tools with the solving of actual societal problems. When I came back from the US in 1997 I went back to Hamburg to get my degree accredited. I briefly looking around for PhD opportunities in Germany but ended up in Cambridge, specializing in remote sensing.'

'In my office in Cambridge I had a fellow PhD student who was interested in GIS. At one point he followed a course at ITC. That was the first time I consciously came across ITC, which at the time was not yet part of the University of Twente but an independent institute. Of course, in the field of remote sensing you will also come across ITC publications and see names popping up. When I finished my PhD in Cambridge I started looking for post doc opportunities. When that didn't pan out, I discovered that ITC was looking for an assistant professor in Spatial Data Acquisition, which is now the EOS department. I interviewed, got the job and started mid-June 2002 as a UD. I'm pretty sure none of my former teachers would have ever predicted that I would end up being a teacher myself [laughs].' 

What do you like about ITC?
'ITC has always struck me as ideal, for a number of reasons. First of all, I'm not very patient and get bored easily. Having a job that allows me variety, new things every day, is very important to me. I can also get quite impatient with people. That's why I'm happy to say that ITC tends to have very dedicated students for whom it's often a privilege to be studying in Europe. It's a wonderful combination of discipline, curiosity and drive. Also, classes are very small. As a teacher you really know all your students and their backgrounds.'

'My specific area of interest is volcanology. However, since there aren't that many volcanoes in the Netherlands, I soon turned to disaster risk management. There is a lot of interest in protecting the environment against natural hazards, but also in remote sensing. In my chair I now combine the two. Technologically speaking I have gone with the times. Satellite remote sensing has really grown up since the late nineties. Data availability has become less of an issue. However, really detailed, close sensing is another matter. I have found that drones can fill a major gap in our sensing capabilities. For that reason I currently focus on developing methods to use drones in post disaster response and damage mapping.'

'That was a matter of luck and timing, really. It wasn't an open door, it was a door I actually had to push for. To be honest, I had been a bit frustrated. Until a few years ago, there were virtually no opportunities for a career at ITC. For me, the connection with the mission, vision and philosophy of ITC had always been strong enough to retain me, but it was getting thinner. By that time, I had been an assistant professor for ten years, which is quite a long time at most universities. But then, ten years ago, when we became a faculty of the University of Twente, the UT introduced a tenure track. ITC soon followed up with an experimental tenure track of its own, for which three colleagues were selected. A year and a half later I managed to enter. I was already pushing 40 then and had a feeling that this might be the last train if I wanted to push forward in my academic career at ITC. So I went for it. In the end, it took me about seven years to finish the tenure track, and I was the first within ITC to finish it.'

'Well, the tenure track turned out to be a strange beast, particularly because the goal posts kept changing. Requirements kept being altered and mixed signals were given. We always felt that we had to tick each and every box. You needed to have major projects coming in but were also required to have also published five articles as first author over a period of five years. When you work a that level that is very difficult, because it takes a lot of time, so most of our articles are published in our capacity as supervisors of PhD students. We felt we had to jump through so many extra hoops, it just didn't seem all that fair. The reason that it did work for me was a combination of being highly motivated and getting lucky with some funding proposals I was working on, in particular from H2020.'

'I have several colleagues whose dads or moms were professors. There are expectations within the family, gowns to be passed on. I of course had none of that. There was no family tradition or family pressure. For many years I didn't have the ambition to be a full professor at all, if only because some professors seemed to be mainly tied up in admin work. I saw them as senior administrators who'd lost touch with science. That was something I didn't want. At that point I would have been satisfied with being an associate professor, staying connected to science while at the same time gaining some recognition and authority. Unfortunately, the tenure track didn't allow for that and there was no other career path to choose. I know of only two people who have moved up within ITC outside of the tenure track. Along the way I discovered that there actually were professors who did manage to find the right balance between administration and science. Now that I'm a full professor myself, my agenda is quite full, but at the same time, if you play it well, you can still retain certain freedoms for yourself.'

'When I look back at the tenure track, it feels like I've been walking up a steep hill and pushing and rolling that boulder in front of me. An then suddenly I hit the top and it's like, now what? What to do with my life now that the pressure has been taken away? Where's my next challenge? Of course, I'm happy that I can breathe more easily again, not having to be evaluated in front of committees all the time. But it feels like a bit of an anti-climax, to be honest. I could consider trying for a position as head of department, but that's not really my thing. I could scheme to be the next dean, but that doesn't attract me either. To me personally those would be title motivated career moves. I don't need to be all the way up there and stand out in that sense. I'm quite happy with where I am now, being a teacher, mentor and coach and showing people the way through the forest I myself encountered all those years ago.'