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…

Dr Marthe Wens
Marthe Wens is an Assistant Professor at the Water and Climate Risk group and Environmental Policy Analysis group of the Institute for Environmental Studies at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam. In 2022 Marthe was a postdoc at the Water and Climate Risk group working on the EDORA project. Marthe successfully defended her PhD research in…

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.…

Lars de Graaff
Lars is a PhD candidate at the department of Water and Climate Risk of the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM). He obtained his Bachelor and Master degree International Land and Water Management at Wageningen University. During his bachelor he did research on irrigation efficiency and drinking water availability in rural areas of Nepal. For his…

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…

Dr Marjolein van Huijgevoort
Marjolein van Huijgevoort is a researcher in the Ecohydrology team of KWR Water and affliated with the Water and Climate Risk Group at IVM – VU. The focus of her research is on drought in the Netherlands, especially in groundwater. The drought of 2018-2020 had a major impact on nature, agriculture, drinking water supply, shipping…

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,…