About Ellen Tromp

Ellen Tromp has been working for Deltares since 2006, after completing her Master of Science degree in Water Management with the thesis ‘Application of a semi-distributed hydrological model based on the REW approach to the Collie River Basin, Western Australia’. While working at Deltares, she obtained her second Master of Science degree in Public Administration from Erasmus University Rotterdam (The Netherlands), with the thesis: ‘Knowledge? Decided! A model about the roles, commitment and the uptake of knowledge on decision-making applied to water interests in spatial planning’ (in Dutch only).

In the initial years, she was involved in projects on water robustness and settlement-free development of locations with soft soils. Tightly coupling of spatial planning and flood risk management (FRM) has created opportunities to incorporate water management measures in urban (re) construction and landscaping, that call for more integrated design processes, and strategies that also address governance and funding. Presently, Ellen is mainly active in interdisciplinary projects in the interaction between the sediment- soil and water system and spatial planning, with a focus on the redesign of flood defences in its surroundings, involving technical and process innovations, and stakeholder engagement. Since 2012, she has been part-time working for the Dutch Flood Protection Programme (DFPP) to stimulate the use of state-of-the-art knowledge and innovations.

In 2019, she completed her doctorate ‘Enhancing knowledge transfer and uptake in the design processes of multifunctional flood defences’. Since then, she also focusses on business development around flood resilient landscapes, with its underlying principle to create social added value while promoting or at least maintaining flood risk management and climate change, given (future) spatial and societal developments. This requires cooperation with (regional) governments, NGO’s, engineering companies, landscape architects and contractors, and many other interest companies. Her broad network, predominantly in the Netherlands, helps to set up new initiatives and innovation projects. In addition, the coupling of societal challenges with (local) stakeholders is also one of the focal points in the research Programme River basins and Estuaries of which Ellen is one of programme team members. Her aim is to enhance the available knowledge in local processes to create co-benefits for the stakeholder and translate societal pressures into new (systemic) integrated approaches.