About Katerina Tzavella
“I see resilience not just as a goal, but as a mindset - one that thrives in complexity and grows through collaboration.”
Dr.-Ing. Katerina Tzavella is a strategic resilience scientist with over a decade of interdisciplinary experience spanning research, policy, and applied science. She actively supports Deltares’ mission, ‘Enabling Delta Life’ by translating systems thinking and spatial risk insights into actionable strategies. Her work integrates geoinformatics, nature-based solutions, and disaster risk management to enhance resilience against floods, cascading risks, and complex environmental and societal challenges.
Drawing upon her academic foundation in civil protection, safety engineering, applied geoinformatics, and marine science, Katerina collaborates across disciplines to bring technical clarity and relevance to socially critical issues. Her research advances emergency preparedness, accessibility, flood risk management, and critical infrastructure resilience. She also incorporates emerging data sources - such as social media analytics - to improve socio-technical links for improved European disaster resilience. Her approach is rooted in strategic vision, interdisciplinary collaboration, and inclusive stakeholder engagement, directly contributing to Deltares' moonshots for resilient cities, integrated flood management, and nature-inclusive solutions.
At Deltares, Katerina serves as:
- Scientific coordinator and task lead for the EU-funded projects NBRACER and DesirMED, supporting transformation and resilience planning across the Atlantic and Mediterranean through spatial analysis and the integration of not only best-fit nature-based solutions but also social-just.
- Deep dive expert for the Pathways2Resilience (P2R) project, facilitating co-creative processes that support transformative climate adaptation in European regions.
Katerina also serves as an Expert Evaluator for the European Commission, assessing funding proposals in innovation, security, and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, including postdoctoral fellowships.
Previously and since 2011, Katerina has applied her expertise in geoinformatics and resilience across Europe. As a Marie Curie Network fellow at Fraunhofer FKIE, she managed the “Sensor and Map Assistance for Search and Rescue Teams” work package, combining particle filtering and GIS for maritime surveillance and the detection of irregular activities. From 2015, she led critical infrastructure resilience initiatives in Germany, identifying interdependencies and fostering stakeholder collaboration. At Cologne University of Applied Sciences, she also co-lectured a Master’s course on systemic interdependencies and vulnerabilities in infrastructure systems and supervised theses on resilience and disaster management. Most recently, as a postdoctoral researcher (2022–2023) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam for the LINKS project, she specialized in crisis management and risk communication integrating volunteered geographic information in resilience strategic planning.
With a deep commitment to mentoring and cross-disciplinary learning, Katerina supports early-career researchers at Deltares in applying resilience concepts and tools within EU projects. She invests in collaborative, forward-looking research to push the boundaries of resilience science.