Josefine Umlauft holds a PhD in Geophysics and leads the Earth and Environmental Sciences group at ScaDS.AI. Her scientific background is rooted in geophysics and wave physics, with a focus on ambient seismic noise analysis, finite-difference modeling, and time-series methods.
Building on this foundation, she has led and contributed to several large field campaigns in environmental seismology, investigating Earth surface and near-surface processes through seismic observations. Today, she coordinates and advances research at the interface of Earth system science and machine learning, with a focus on integrating heterogeneous environmental data sources and developing scalable, data-driven approaches for environmental monitoring and analysis.
Her research focuses on understanding environmental and ecological processes through physical sensing and data-driven analysis. A central theme is environmental seismology, where acoustic and elastic signals are used to study dynamic Earth surface processes and their relevance for ecosystem and biodiversity dynamics across scales.
Methodologically, her work centers on advanced time-series analysis and machine learning, with an emphasis on denoising, prediction, explainable AI, and image segmentation and tracking. She works with a range of data sources, including seismic measurements, satellite, drone, and time-lapse imagery, and uses Earth system data cubes as a common data format to organize and analyze multimodal environmental data. A key research direction is the development of machine learning tooling that enables scalable, interpretable, and, in the long term, integrated analysis of heterogeneous Earth system datasets.