Rate My Professor Glenn van de Ven

Glenn van de Ven is Univ.-Prof. Dr. and Full Professor of Theoretical Extragalactic Astrophysics in the Department of Astrophysics, Faculty of Earth Sciences, Geography and Astronomy at the University of Vienna, where he has held the position since March 2019. He leads the research group "Dynamics of Stellar Systems," heads the Vienna Observatory since 2022, and serves as Director of the Vienna International School of Earth and Space Sciences (VISESS) and the Doctoral Study Program in Earth Sciences, Geography and Astronomy. Previously, he was Research Group Leader and tenured staff member at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg from 2009 to 2018, International Staff Member and Faculty Astronomer at the European Southern Observatory in Garching from 2017 to 2019, Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from 2006 to 2009, and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University in 2006. Van de Ven earned his B.Sc. in Astronomy and Mathematics from Leiden University in 1999, M.Sc. in Astronomy and Mathematics with honour in 2001 (thesis: "Kinematics of triaxial galaxies: solving the Jeans equations"), and Ph.D. in Astronomy with honour in 2005 (thesis: "Dynamical structure and evolution of stellar systems"), both supervised by Prof. Dr. Tim de Zeeuw.

His research centers on constructing detailed dynamical models of globular clusters and nearby galaxies to infer luminous and dark matter distributions, uncover formation histories through population dynamics, and investigate the co-evolution of supermassive black holes and galaxies. His group develops the publicly available DYNAMITE code for orbital modeling incorporating stellar populations. Van de Ven has secured major funding, including the ERC Consolidator Grant "ArcheoDyn" (2017–2023, €2 million), FWF Special Research Programme SFB F68 "Tomography Across the Scales" (2022–2026), and others such as DAAD and EU ITN DAGAL. He has authored or co-authored over 355 publications, with more than 28,000 citations and an h-index of 58. Key works include "Distance measurements from the internal dynamics of globular clusters: Application to the Sombrero galaxy (M 104)" (2026), "Glance: A Comprehensive Framework for Galactic Archaeology" (2026), and "Extragalactic Archaeology: The Assembly History of Galaxies from Dynamical and Stellar Population Models" (2023). He has delivered numerous invited lectures worldwide, organized international conferences such as "Dynamical Reconstruction of Galaxies" (2020), and contributes as a referee for journals like MNRAS, ApJ, and funding agencies including ERC and NSF.