About Désirée Plenker

Désirée Plenker is a civil engineer with versatile experience in the field on hydraulic engineering and geotechnical engineering. She completed in 2012 her studies at the Technical University Aachen (Germany) on hydraulic engineering, geotechnical engineering and solid structures with the degree of a Diplom-Ingenieur (equal to Master degree).

Afterwards, she started working at the Hamburg University of Technology in the Department on Geotechnical Engineering and Construction Management. In this time she specialised on interaction processes between the media fluid and soil. Therefore, she worked on investigations of the small scale processes between a disperse granular medium and fluid on different applications. The projects included physical tests as well as numerical simulation with the coupled CFD-DEM approach, which was new on the field of geotechnical engineering.

Her PhD thesis on “Physical and Numerical Investigations on the Interaction of Granular Media and Fluid” is going to be published in 2020. After her work at university, she moved to the Netherlands to work as a consultant/researcher at the independent research institute Deltares, to work in the Hydraulic Engineering Unit on fields of Harbour, Coastal and Offshore solutions.