Marleen de Ruiter is an Assistant Professor at the department of Water and Climate Risk of the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and she is co-chair of the RiskKAN network.

Her PhD research focused on the temporal dynamics of disaster vulnerability. Before that, she obtained her MSc degree in Environmental and Resource Management from the University of British Columbia (Canada) where she looked at disaster vulnerability of coastal communities and their post-disaster recovery. 

In her current research, she focuses on consecutive disasters, improving modelling capabilities of multi-hazard risk and assessing the impacts of adaptation measures on Disaster Risk Reduction. As a Veni Laureate from the Dutch Research Council's Talent Scheme (NWO), she works on the global consecutive occurrence of consecutive disasters followed by water-borne disease outbreaks using a Dynamic Bayesian Network approach. In 2024, she was granted the EGU Natural Hazards Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist award. 

She manages the EU H2020 project Myriad-EU on multi-hazard risk assessments and management, she is the scientific officer of the EGU multi-hazard sub-division, she co-leads the RiskKAN working group on systemic risk and early warning systems, she is associate editor of Earth's Future and she leads special issues in NHESS and Cell Press iScience. As of fall 2024, she is also an editor of IJDRR. Together with colleague Dr. Sander Veraverbeke, she leads the Amsterdam Sustainability Institute cluster on Natural Hazards & Society.  

She co-developed the Climate Econometrics master specialization at VU Amsterdam, and she is the coordinator of the MSc Earth Sciences and its specialisation Global Environmental Change & Policy (GECP) at VU Amsterdam. She also leads a VU Dream Team of students from all different faculties who are working together on a wildfire risk project. 

Her PhD publications earned her Wiley’s Earths Future most cited paper award, the American Geosciences Union (AGU) outstanding student presentation award, and the European Geosciences Union (EGU) Early Career Scientist's Travel Support.

Expertise

Consecutive disasters, multi-hazard risk, risk and vulnerability assessments, (asynergies of) DRR measures, and post-disaster community recovery.

2020: PhD, Institute for Environmental Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

2011: MSc Resource Management and Environmental Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada.

2009: BSc Earth and Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

2006: Propedeutics Econometrics and Operational Research Management, University of Amsterdam.

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