The Calderon prize is awarded to a researcher under the age of forty who has made distinguished contributions to the field of inverse problems. The prize is sponsored by the Inverse Problems International Association. It is given every two year and is accompanied by an award of 500 euros and an invitation to present a plenary lecture at the bi-annual conference on Applied Inverse Problems. The Calderon prize in 2009 was financially supported by the journals Inverse Problems and Imaging (published by American Institute of Mathematical Sciences) and Inverse Problems (IOP Publishing), and the Finnish Inverse Problems Society. The Calderon prize committee for 2009 consisted of David Colton (chair), Simon Arridge, and Matti Lassas.

The winner of the Calderon prize in 2009 is professor Martin Burger. Professor Burger received his Ph.D. from professor Heinz Engl at the Johannes Kepler University of Linz and is currently a professor at the Westfaelische Wilhelms Universitaet Muenster.
He has done research on regularization and the numerical solution of inverse problems in shape reconstruction semiconductor modeling, learning theory and image restoration. His contributions are basic, including modeling, numerical computation, analysis and innovative algorithms.
In particular, professor Burger has developed a rigorous functional analytic framework for using level set methods in shape reconstruction and optimization problems. His research is innovative and has produced very useful algorithms which are presented together with rigorous analysis, interesting applications and convincing numerical results.