About Pim Willemsen

Climate change increases the risk of flooding of deltas worldwide, whilst biodiversity is declining. Traditional engineering solutions for flood protection form hard boundaries in coastal ecosystems, designed according to abiotic knowledge. Pim’s work focusses on the fascinating feedback between waves, tides, morphology and ecology in deltas estuaries and shallow seas.

I am driven by going outside to the field, looking at landscape development and the processes that play a role in this development. I am convinced we can have a more sustainable future by relying on ecosystems and a naturally functioning system to provide climate change adaptation and mitigation while enabling biological diversity. Accordingly, we need to integrate ecology in coastal engineering.

Pim Willemsen

By training (University of Twente) Pim is a Civil Engineer with a specialization in Water Engineering and Management (MSc). During his Master thesis (National University of Singapore) he became fascinated by coastal wetlands. During his PhD (NIOZ, University of Twente) and postdoc research (University of Twente, Wageningen University) he further specialized in biogeomorphology of estuaries, deltas and shallow seas (tidal flats, salt marshes, mangroves) and how they function in Nature-based Solutions and provide Ecosystem Services. He aims at bringing scientific advances directly to application at Deltares. He likes working in this dynamic and multidisciplinary environment. He applies a range of methods and disciplines, including historical data analysis, conducting field measurements and flume studies, and process-based and simple numerical models.

Above all, he likes to bring researchers and advisors from different disciplines together to gain relevant knowledge for societal issues. Within Deltares his work contributes to a range of moonshots, including liveable deltas, making the world’s population safer from flooding, healthy water and subsurface systems and resilient infrastructure.

Pim is a very accessible colleague, driven by curiosity, and always open to explore new ideas.

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