New staff member: Hassan Niazi
My self-congratulatory belief that the degree of control over water resources defines geo-strategic and economic stature of nations has got me here.
Being a civil engineer by training, coming from Pakistan and having academic and consulting experience, resulted in MSc in Civil Engineering with distinction from NTNU Norway, SOTON UK, and TUDelft Netherlands. Before joining TUDelft I have worked at my BSc university FAST-NU and engineering consultants like Deltares and Mott MacDonald.
Originally, I come from highly vulnerable, low-income part of the world who is a first-hand witness of adversity in the times of natural disasters. The very reason made me work on master thesis titled as ‘Flood Risk Prediction under Global Vegetated Hydrodynamics: A Bayesian Network’. The thesis was about creating a non-parametric Bayesian network based tool for decision makers to asses flood risk mitigation potential of coastal vegetation.
Currently, I am involved in research themes related to exploring system-level nature based solutions for hydraulic engineering problems. I am also assisting flood risk section to improve master-level courses related to probabilistic design. Working with students for supervision of their master research projects is also something I take interest in. As a part of that, the on-going projects are:
- Nature-based engineered system in the Red Sea. The project is aimed at finding ideal conditions for a hydrodynamics-driven beach-turtle-seagrass nexus to prevail.
- Building with nature solutions for flood defences. The project is aimed at dependence modelling of vegetated foreshores which caters spatial and temporal variability of parameters.
Coming from a river engineering and hydrology background, I am also involved in research related to water-food-energy nexus. Other topics of interest include dependence modelling and game theory.
To balance the work-life seesaw, mostly I keep myself occupied with Catan championships, photography pursuits, and entrepreneurial endeavours.
