Joern Helbert received his diploma in Physics from the Technical University of Braunschweig (Germany) and this Doctorate from the Free University of Berlin (Germany). He is currently the head of the Planetary Laboratories department at the Institute for Planetary Research of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). He has worked on a range ESA, NASA and JAXA planetary missions and is the Co-Principle Investigator of the MERTIS instrument on the ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission, as well as the PI of the VenSpec-M instrument and coordinator of the VenSpec Suite on the ESA EnVision mission. He is the instrument lead for the VEM instrument on the recently selected VERITAS mission.