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 on mangrove hydrology and reforestation before.

Anne is an Associate Prof on Drought Risk at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands, since February 2020. Before this she was a Senior Lecturer in Water Science at the University of Birmingham since October 2014. Anne is leading the IAHS Panta Rhei group on “Drought in the Anthroprocene“, is co-convening the EGU Hydrological Sciences Division session “Hydrological extremes: from droughts to floods“, and is Associate Editor of Hydrological Sciences Journal and Frontiers In Water. In 2017 she was awarded the EGU Hydrological Sciences Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award.

Anne did her PhD and postdoc at Wageningen University (the Netherlands), supervised by Henny Van Lanen, on understanding the propagation from meteorological to hydrological drought in different climates and catchments. The PhD project was rewarded with a Storm-van der Chijs Stipendium for most talented female PhD researcher of Wageningen University and the 2013 Water Resources Research annual Editors’ Choice Award, indicating extremely high quality and significance, for the paper: Making the distinction between water scarcity and drought using an observation-modeling framework.

Before her PhD Anne worked for the consultancy company FutureWater on projects about water management in Kenya and Turkey, for the NGO PROFAFOR investigating the effect of forest plantations on soil and water in Ecuador, and on an MSc project on mangrove restoration in Vietnam. Anne has a very broad interest and always try to combine sound science (by using robust data-analysis and modelling approaches) with societal relevance (by focusing on local people’s needs). The values that underpin Anne’s work are:

  • Science for understanding the beautiful world around us to help protect it
  • Open science
  • Equality and diversity
  • Reaching out beyond academia
    • working with local communities
    • blogging about research
    • teaching primary and secondary school kids

To contact Anne, please send her an email.

For more information about Anne’s research activities: