Organisational ties

The chair AS of course cannot act on its own. This will be clear immediately by looking at the educational program, which shows many crosslinks and forms of cooperation with other groups of the faculty and elsewhere in the university.

This holds for the M.Sc. part of the curriculum and for the research component even stronger, where AS is in close cooperation with a large number of (inter)national institutes and universities. A number of these cooperations have been institutionalized.

At the "lowest" level, one finds the Delft Institute for Earth Oriented Space Research (DEOS), which incorporates AS and the sections Physical, Geometrical and Space Geodesy (FMR) and Mathematical Geodesy and Positioning (MGP). DEOS was formally established in 1997, but the cooperation between the various groups dates back several decades.

To strengthen the scientific component of the research in particular, DEOS has teamed up with the Faculty of Earth Sciences of Utrecht University officially in 1996, forming the Vening Meinesz Research School for Geodynamics (VMSG). The combination of the various research groups came as no surprise, since the activities complement each other very well. This institute is set up to train and expand the research skills of Ph.D. students in particular.

At the national level, finally, VMSG in turn participates in the research program Integrated Solid Earth Sciences (ISES), which includes groups from the University of Amsterdam in addition to the Utrecht/Delft team. ISES is one of the six new "bonus incentive research programs" established by NWO in 1998. The contacts and activities within ISES are aimed at Ph.D. students and so-called post-docs in particular.