teaching – Coastally Curious

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Big news to start 2023: I am now an Assistant Professor in Coastal Engineering here at TU Delft! An opening appeared online last summer, and after weeks of preparing applications, several rounds of interviews and a teaching demonstration, and a lot of waiting, I finally got the good news. This has been my dream job for a long time and I can’t believe it came true.

Officially, my new portfolio will focus on “Climate-Robust Deltas”. How does sediment contribute to the strength and adaptability of our coasts and deltas against the effects of sea level rise and climate change? In my research we approach this gigantic problem by quantifying sediment pathways and connectivity for strategic placement of sediment, using a combination of numerical modelling and field measurements. In the coming years, I hope to build up a diverse team of enthusiastic, coastally curious researchers to tackle these challenges. Stay tuned for opportunities to join our group!

PhD Summer School Opportunity

EXCITING OPPORTUNITY ALERT!

At the end of June, we will welcome a group of about a dozen American PhD students for our second annual IRES summer school, hosted at Deltares/TU Delft/Utrecht University and organized by the University of New Orleans and The Water Institute of the Gulf in Louisiana.

Last year we hosted 14 American PhD students for two (fully funded!) weeks in beautiful Delft. It includes D-Flow FM model training, cool field trips to sites around the Netherlands, a lab session, networking galore, guest lectures, and time for exploring the area. Last year everyone seemed to learn a lot and have a pretty good time (I sure did!). We have a great team and are excited to make it even better this year. Please share this with anyone in your network whom you know might be interested!

More details can be found in the pdf below. If you are interested you can apply here before January 27th, 2023. We will host the summer school for a third and final time in 2024, so if you are too late or ineligible this year, stay tuned for another chance next year!

The Beach: A River of Sand

It’s February, which means it’s Coastal Dynamics season again! 5 years ago (time flies!), I first arrived in the Netherlands as part of my master’s program. I walked into the classroom for Judith Bosboom’s Coastal Dynamics 1 course, and it really changed everything for me. CD1 felt like the course I had been waiting for all my life, combining geology, geography, physics, and practical engineering all in one package. The course was also so well-taught and structured that it seemed like an IV drip of knowledge, pulsing straight to your brain. I felt like I was truly in the right place and coastal engineering was the field for me. It cranked my enthusiasm for all things coastal to 11.

After I became a PhD student, I began TAing the course and learned what it was like on the other side of the classroom. This revealed a hitherto unsuspected enthusiasm for teaching (although perhaps it shouldn’t have been a big surprise, given that I come from a large family of teachers), and has been a big factor in my interest to stay in academia.

Every year, we start the course by showing students the video “River of Sand”, which explains coastal sediment transport in an easily understandable way. This video is 55 years old now, but it still does a better job of explaining how beaches work than almost anything else I’ve seen. I hope you enjoy it as much as we do!