Meet the team!
People

Dr Anne Van Loon
Anne is a hydrologist interested in the relationship between water, people and the environment. Her research focuses on hydrological extremes (droughts and floods) and uses interdisciplinary methods to understand hydrological processes and their interaction with human activities. She currently works on drought risk, groundwater, snow and ice, and water management. She has also done work…

Marthe Wens
Marthe Wens is a PhD researcher at the Water and Climate Risk group of the Institute for Environmental Studies at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam. Her research concerns assessing drought risk in Eastern Africa, under various trends such as climate change and socio economic development. She is currently investigating ways to improve drought risk profiles…

Raed Hamed
Raed Hamed is a PhD researcher within the Water & Climate Risk group at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM). His work focuses on developing storylines that will investigate the impacts of current and future climate variability on staple crop production in key hotspot regions around the world. This will be done using a combination…

Alessia Matanó
Alessia Matanò is a PhD researcher working in the Water and Climate Risk group at the Institute for Environmental Studies at VU Amsterdam. Her work focuses on drought-flood compound risks in Eastern and Southern Africa. She is studying how compound crises evolve and assessing whether current multi-dimensional risk monitoring systems could support decision-makers. She worked…

Rhoda Odongo
Rhoda Odongo is a PhD researcher in the department of Water and Climate Risk of the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work focuses on the data-driven assessment of drought risk to understand existing and possible future interactions between climate, hydrology, land and water use, and management focusing mainly on the…

Ileen Streefkerk
Ileen is a PhD candidate in the department of Water and Climate Risk of the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She obtained her Bachelor degree Civil Engineering at the TU Delft and continued there with the master Water Management. During her master thesis she studied local knowledge of farming communities…

Heidi Mendoza
Heidi Mendoza is a PhD Candidate from the Water and Climate Risk group at the Institute of Environmental Studies (IVM). Her PhD research focuses on the past and future qualitative storylines of drought-to-flood events as part of the PerfectSTORM Project (‘STOrylines of futuRe extreMes’). Before joining VU, she was the Program Coordinator of the Sustainable…

Ruben Weesie
Ruben Weesie is a PhD researcher at VU Amsterdam, at the Water & Climate Risk and Environmental Policy Analysis groups. His research focuses on qualitative narratives of drought-to-flood events under the PerfectSTORM project. He focuses on how narratives related to drought-to-flood events are shaped, and how they affect anticipations and reactions to these events. Ruben studied…

Lotte Muller
Lotte is a PhD candidate in the Water and Climate Risk department and Environmental Economics department, of the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM), at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her PhD will focus on investigating the emergence of different feedbacks between climate change, climate service data, socio-economic behaviour, and adaptation measures in specific European case studies.…

Katherine Kowal
Katie is a PhD student in the School of Geography and the Environment based at the University of Oxford. Her current research focuses on drought predictability in Central America, which includes an examination of the usefulness of forecasts for decision-making. Other elements of Katie’s research will assess model uncertainty and the impacts of uncertainty on…

Lucinda Capewell
Lucinda is a PhD student with a passion for flood research. Lucinda began her studies at the University of Chester with a BSc in Geography and Natural Hazard Management. Following a dissertation thesis based on the use of Property Level Flood Protection in Worcestershire, Lucinda continued her studies in this area and completed a MSc…

Dr Gabriela Guimarães Nobre
I joined the Institute for Environmental Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2015, as part of the IMPREX project. My PhD research investigated how climate variability can be used as early warning predictors of flood and agricultural drought impacts, and as drivers of risk financing mechanisms. Currently, I am a postdoctoral researcher at the…

Visiting group members
We welcome visiting scholars to our group. Our visitors in 2022: Natalia Limones – from University of Sevilla – see here and here Unfortunately no visits were possible in 2020 and 2021. These were our visitors in 2018 & 2019: Marit Van Tiel – from University of Freiburg – see here. Marina Peña-Gallardo – from CSIC,…