Lilian Schuster

About me

I am a PhD student at the Department of Atmospheric and Cryospheric Sciences (ACINN), Universität Innsbruck. For my PhD, I am working with the Open Global Glacier Model (OGGM) on the topic of “Improving our understanding of future multi-century mountain glacier changes and runoff”, supervised by Fabien Maussion and David Rounce.

During my PhD, I worked on both large-scale mountain glacier mass-balance model calibration and projection uncertainties, as well as on more public and policy-relevant multi-century glacier mass and runoff projections. A selection of my most important preprints and publications is provided below. A complete list of contributions is available under publications and preprints.

I am an active part of the OGGM community and the Glacier Model Intercomparison Project Phase 3 (GlacierMIP3), and I was part of an interdisciplinary project on climate change impact research (PROVIDE EU H2020 project). I like to engage in climate and glacier change communication projects. These include workshops and excursions to glaciers, glacier projection visualizations for reports (e.g. State of the Cryosphere 2023 and 2024 reports), and the “Goodbye Glaciers” initiative — a hiking signpost project and website about future glacier loss, with a focus on Central Europe.

I expect to defend my PhD by the end of March 2025 and am looking for a postdoc or other scientific position starting in autumn/winter 2025. It would be great to stay near mountains! I am also open to developing a small postdoc proposal that aligns with your research group and my research interests.

Education & previous research

I hold an M.Sc. in Atmospheric Sciences with a focus on Climate and Glaciology from the Universität Innsbruck, Austria. My Master’s thesis topic was the Response time sensitivity of glaciers using the open global glacier model: from idealised experiments to an estimate for alpine glaciers, supervised by Fabien Maussion. During my Master’s studies, I also worked as a student research assistant on the climatology of precipitation and moisture sources over an arid region in Northeast Greenland as part of the Northeast Greenland Caves Project, led by Gina Moseley, which resulted in a publication (Schuster et al., 2021).

Previously, I earned a B.Sc. in Physics at the Universität Konstanz, Germany, complemented by an internship at the Andøya Space Center in Norway, where I worked on my Bachelor thesis about simulating height-dependent solar UV irradiance in the mesopause region.