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. 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. In recent decades, there has been a striking number of countries suffering from consecutive disasters: different events impacting the same area within days, months or years from each other, when recovery from an earlier event is still under way. Current state-of-the art regional and global models do not allow for a thorough representation and analysis of consecutive events and their impacts. Moreover, adaptation measures are generally aimed at one particular hazard type although they can have opposing effects on a different hazard type.

In addressing these challenges, her projects include:

• Developing consecutive event models at a global and local scale.
• The effects of consecutive disasters on migration.
• Improving understanding of (potentially opposing) effects of adaptation measures on Disaster Risk Reduction.
• The effects of consecutive disasters on wildlife populations.
• Improving multi-hazard risk modelling in a case study of the Philippines, in collaboration with the Red Cross' 510 Global Team.  

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 one of the directors of the SENSE Research School, 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.

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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