dr. PSJ (Philip) Minderhoud

Philip Minderhoud is an Assistant Professor and Veni laureate at the University of Wageningen and affiliated researcher (former EU Marie Curie research fellow) at the University of Padova, Italy. He is also connected as advisor to the Deltares Research Institute. As Physical Geographer, he specializes in environmental change in coastal-deltaic areas, with a prime focus on land subsidence, elevation change and consequent relative sea-level rise in deltas. His research connects the fields of geomorphology, geology, hydrogeology, geomechanical engineering, and remote sensing. Since 2014 he has been worked in the Vietnamese Mekong delta within the Dutch-Vietnamese Rise and Fall project, primarily focused on delta land subsidence where he subsequently gained his PhD.

Currently his research expands to coastal-deltaic areas around the world, with prime focus on increasing the fundamental understanding of processes and drivers of deltaic land subsidence, developing numerical capacities to improve spatial-temporal assessments of current and projections of future deltaic subsidence and delta elevation change.

His current research projects encompass coastal-deltaic areas in South Asia (e.g. Mekong, Irrawaddy, Chao Praya deltas, the North Java coastline & Manila Bay area), West Africa (e.g. Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana and the entire West African coastline under the ENGULF project), Europe (e.g. Venice Lagoon, Volturno delta) and the Mississippi delta (USA).

The research efforts ultimately aim to contribute to improved relative SLR projections and development of effective management and mitigation strategies, aimed to reduce human-induced (hence avoidable) land subsidence in coastal-deltaic areas in the world.Through his impact-orientated research he increases awareness and creates collaborative research uptake by actively engaging with international governmental organizations, policymakers, private sector, knowledge institutes and NGO's to promote strategies to combat ongoing land subsidence and accelerated sea-level rise.

Additionally, he has co-founded the International Panel of Land Subsidence (www.IPLSubsidence.org) which aims to unite the global subsidence research communities to combat relative sea-level rise at a global scale and correctly integrate contemporary and projected land subsidence and coastal elevation change into official global sea-level rise(SLR)  projections (i.e. IPCCs AR7 report) to provide effective relative SLR projections to inform governments and policymakers.

As University Lecturer he is involved in several BSc (SGL-13806 Intro to Geology Soils and Landscapes) and MSc courses (HWM-33306 Coastal oceanography and delta geology, SGL-31806 Field Training Geosciences in Spain) and supervision of individual BSc, MSc theses and internships.