Wout van Dijk

My name is Wout van Dijk and I work as a Post-Doctoral Researcher Associate at Durham University, faculty of Geography since the 1st of October 2013. I was born in november 1983 in Leidschendam, moved to Zoetermeer, and lived for four years in Utrecht. In oktbober 2013, I moved to the UK to start a new job. I like to play soccer, go out to cycle, walk or run.

I just finished my PhD-research on how meandering rivers can form in a laboratory, which I did from 2009-2013 at Utrecht University, faculty of Geosciences. The title of my dissertation is 'Meandering rivers - feedbacks between channel dynamics, floodplain and vegetation'. Earlier experiments failed to reproduce sustainable meandering. The question is to what extent this is due to scaling problems and to what extent it reflects our limited understanding. So far, we simulate several river patterns by varying sediment mixtures. Further, we seeded small vegetation to understand the effect of vegetation on the channel pattern. Our experiments represents a gravel-bed river. A very nice example of a gravel-bed meandering river is the river Allier in France (in reserve naturelle Val d'Allier, goo.gl/FRBG8). Now, I am working on the Changing Water Cycle project in Durham. The objective is to model the architecture of the palaeochannel aquifer system, constrained by data from the northwestern Indo-Gangetic Plains, to develop a regional-scale understanding of aquifer geometry, the degree of connectivity within the system, and its likely evolution over Holocene time scales.