How can we ensure that vulnerable coasts and deltas remain robust to the effects of climate change? We need to better understand how sediment moves along our coasts and deltas, and plan to do so by treating coastal systems as networks of interconnected sediment pathways.
We are looking for a curious and motivated PhD candidate to work with us on an exciting project here at TU Delft in the Netherlands. The main goal of this position is to develop novel approaches to quantify sediment pathways and connectivity, and to use these approaches to inform coastal sediment management.
Our main strategy for ensuring the climate-robustness of the Dutch coast is to nourish or place sand to widen its beaches and dunes. However, the fate of sand placed on the coast is still poorly understood in the context of the full coastal system. Understanding where nourished sand goes is necessarily rooted in understanding the natural sediment transport pathways and connectivity of the system. To take advantage of advances in the field of network analysis and extend these concepts to analyzing sediment transport pathways in coastal systems, we established the framework of coastal sediment connectivity (Pearson et al., 2020).
In this project, you will advance coastal engineering by introducing established techniques from other fields (e.g., network analysis) in a novel way to understand and predict sediment transport. These techniques will yield a new and useful toolbox of methods for predicting and understanding sediment pathways, and enable more efficient and effective nourishment design and execution. This will ultimately contribute to the robustness of the Dutch coast to climate change and the safety of its people against flood hazards.
In this PhD, you will:
- Apply network analysis techniques to better understand how sediment pathways are connected at small/short and large/long space/time scales.
- Use coastal sediment connectivity networks to probabilistically model sediment pathways via Markov chains or machine learning approaches.
- Quantify (a)synchronization of coastal sediment networks and relate to hydrodynamic forcing.
- Relate quantitative metrics of network structure to practical coastal management goals (eg, identifying resilience or tipping points).
At TU Delft, you will be part of the Coastal Engineering section where we combine research on hydrodynamics, morphodynamics, and human interventions to the coast using numerical modeling and field measurements. You will primarily work with me (Stuart Pearson) and Ad Reniers, embedded within a larger ecosystem of research partners.
More information about the topic and the application process can be found here: https://www.tudelft.nl/over-tu-delft/werken-bij-tu-delft/vacatures/details?jobId=14744
Come join our team! Feel free to get in touch with us (s.g.pearson@tudelft.nl) if you have any questions. Applications close November 30th, 2023!
Coastally Curious 