About Désirée Plenker

Désirée Plenker has a background in civil engineer and gained versatile experience in the field on hydraulic and geotechnical engineering. At Deltares she works at the department of Hydrodynamic and Offshore Technology and uses her expertise on local hydrodynamics, waves, geotechnics, morphodynamics and their complex interaction with offshore structures in consultancy and research projects.

Her daily work comprises amongst other the determination of hydrodynamic loads from waves and currents on offshore structures, scour development and optimisation of scour protection designs to reduce costs and expand structure lifetime and more. Thereby, she connects her scientific knowledge with practical engineering to offer tailor-made solutions for complex problems. In collaboration with other experts at Deltares and partners from academia and industry, she contributes as a researcher in international applied research projects to develop new knowledge and solutions and make these applicable for the industry.

Before she joined Deltares, she successfully completed her civil engineering studies at the Technical University Aachen (Germany) and held afterwards a position as researcher at the Hamburg University of Technology (Germany) in the Department on Geotechnical Engineering and Construction Management. In this time, she specialised on the field of fluid and soil interaction processes, which has also been the focus of her PhD "Physical and Numerical Investigations on the Interaction of Granular Media and Fluid"