Professor Katerina Michaelides
B.Sc., Ph.D.(Lond.)
Current positions
Professor of Dryland Hydrology
School of Geographical Sciences
Contact
Press and media
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Research interests
Katerina is a Professor of Dryland Hydrology in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol, the co-lead of the Water Theme of the Cabot Institute for the Environment, and an Associate Researcher in the Earth Research Institute at University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). She received her PhD in Hydrology of Arid Environments from King’s College London in 2000. She comes from the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.
Her research focuses primarily on processes in dryland environments from a theoretical and applied perspective. This includes research on dryland hydro-climatology, Earth surface processes, and desertification dynamics. For the last 10 years she has been working on understanding why and how dryland fluvial environments differ from their humid counterparts. She leads a multidisciplinary research programme focused on droughts and land degradation in East African drylands of Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia. This research has a strong international development focus and involves the creation of novel tools (including models and mobile phone apps) to aid rural communities in adapting to droughts and future climate change. In 2023 she was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to research hydrological signatures of aridity.
Katerina has been awarded research grants from many funders including the UKRI Global Challenges Research Fund, the Royal Society, the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), and the EU Horizon 2020 program.
For further information on Katerina’s research please go to the Dryland Research Group website (http://michaelides.eri.ucsb.edu/).
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
Seasonal IMpact-Based OutLooks
Principal Investigator
Role
Co-Investigator
Description
Advancing an approach to the co-development of impact-based seasonal outlooks for regional and national climate outlook forums.Managing organisational unit
School of Geographical SciencesDates
01/10/2022 to 31/03/2024
Discipline-hopping workshops: Co-producing new inter-disciplinary research in global environmental challenges
Principal Investigator
Role
Co-Principal Investigator
Description
Through collaborative workshops and individual interviews, the project explores the co-production as a methodology for interdisciplinary research focused on the theme Global Environmental Challenges.Dates
01/04/2022 to 31/07/2022
DOWN2EARTH
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
School of Geographical SciencesDates
01/09/2020 to 31/08/2024
Rework of Mobile phone App Development for Drought Adaptation in Drylands (MAD DAD)
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
School of Geographical SciencesDates
01/10/2019 to 31/03/2022
Drought Resilience In East African dryland Regions (DRIER)
Principal Investigator
Description
Royal Society GrantDates
01/06/2019 to 30/11/2021
Thesis supervisions
Climatic controls on drainage basin hydrology and topographic evolution
Supervisors
Quantifying the efficacy of Natural Flood Management in agricultural headwater catchments
Supervisors
Impacts of environmental change on soil nitrogen in emerging and degrading arid ecosystems
Supervisors
Impacts of climate and climate change on water and vegetation dynamics in Horn of Africa drylands
Supervisors
Integrated modelling of slope hydrology and stability hazards to explore the potential effects of land use and climate change on dynamic multi-hazard interactions
Supervisors
Publications
Selected publications
26/09/2019Aridity is expressed in river topography globally
Nature
Spatial and temporal analysis of hillslope–channel coupling and implications for the longitudinal profile in a dryland basin
Earth Surface Processes and Landforms
Deciphering the expression of climate change within the Lower Colorado River basin by stochastic simulation of convective rainfall
Environmental Research Letters
Recent publications
12/07/2024STORM v.2
Geoscientific Model Development
Dryland self-expansion enabled by land–atmosphere feedbacks
Science
stoPET v1.0: a stochastic potential evapotranspiration generator for simulation of climate change impacts
Geoscientific Model Development
Translating seasonal climate forecasts into water balance forecasts for decision making
PLOS Climate
Assessing the efficacy of offline water storage ponds for natural flood management
Hydrological Processes