ESSC Members

Anny Cazenave

LEGOS - CNES, Toulouse, FR

Research Interests

Earth and climate sciences

ANNY CAZENAVE is a French space geodesist and one of the pioneers in satellite altimetry. She works for the French space agency CNES and has been deputy director of the Laboratoire d’Etudes en Geophysique et Oceanographie Spatiale (LEGOS) at Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées in Toulouse since 1996. Since 2013, she is director of Earth sciences at the International Space Sciences institute (ISSI), in Bern (Switzerland).

As one of the leading scientists in the joint French/American satellite altimetry missions TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1, and the Ocean Surface Topography Mission, she has contributed to a greater understanding of sea level rise caused by global warming. Cazenave is a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and was the lead author of the sea level sections for their fourth and fifth Assessment Reports.

Honors and Awards : 

  • Member of the French Academy of Sciences (2004)
  • Foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) (2008), Indian National Science Academy (INSA; 2011) and Royal Academy of Sciences, Belgium (2014). 
  • Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (1996) and American Association for Advancement of Sciences (AAAS; 2012). 
  • Several prizes, including the Vening-Meinesz Medal of the European Geophysical Society (1999); Arthur Homes Medal of the European Geosciences Union (2005); Prize Manley Bendall, Medal ‘Albert 1er de Monaco’ (2008); Bowie Medal of the American Geophysical Union (2012); Prize ‘Georges Lemaître’ of the Catholic University of Louvain (2015); BBVA ‘Frontiers of Knowledge’ Award, category ‘Climate Change’, shared with John Church anf Jonathan Gregory (2019); Vetlesen Prize, Columbia University (2020).