About Nena Vandebroek

Nena (Elena) Vandebroek has 13 years’ experience as a coastal engineer in the Netherlands, U.S., and Belgium. At Deltares, Nena addresses both near- and long-term challenges related to coastal flooding. Some days she develops operational coastal forecasting systems that predict water levels, waves, and currents for the upcoming week. On other days, she analyses coastal flood and erosion risk and makes plans for adapting to rising sea levels over the next 100+ years.

Nena is skilled in the design and implementation of forecasting and early warning systems using Delft-FEWS, a highly flexible and open platform for water management. She integrates in-situ measurements, remotely sensed data, and numerical models to produce customized forecasting products (e.g. web interfaces, reports, text messages). This enables clients, often national or regional governmental agencies, to deliver clear, timely, and accurate forecast information to their end users. Nena has contributed to the set-up and maintenance of operational systems in the Netherlands, Mozambique, Mauritius, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, Canada, Australia, Bangladesh, and Singapore.

Much of Nena’s work related to sea level rise adaptation has focused on Small Island Developing States (SIDS), often funded by The World Bank. From 2019 to 2023 she was deputy project manager for the Coastal Vulnerability Assessment for Majuro Atoll (Marshall Islands), which analysed coastal hazards and designed/costed a range of adaptation measures for reducing flood risk today and in the future. She has applied her extensive GIS expertise in many similar projects in São Tomé and Príncipe, Tuvalu and Kiribati, and Mozambique.

Prior to joining Deltares, Nena worked as a coastal engineer and project manager on various stakeholder-driven coastal and estuarine management and restoration projects along the U.S. Pacific Coast and in Belgium. There she gained broad experience in field data collection, including topographic and bathymetric surveys, water quality measurements, sediment sampling, and more. Nena obtained her master’s in civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University in 2011. In 2014, she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in Water Management at Delft University of Technology, where she used high resolution satellite radar data to monitor shoreline change along the Dutch coast. Outside of work, you can often find her exploring new places on foot or in her sea kayak.