Georgia DestouniProfessor i hydrologi

As professor of Engineering Hydrology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology during 1999-2005, I developed and taught courses in this and related subjects within the Civil Engineering programme and the international Master's Programme in Environmental Engineering and Sustainable Infrastructure at KTH. As a new professor at Stockholm University in 2005, in a new subject area Hydrology, Hydrogeology and Water Resources for this university, I have with colleagues in our expanding research and educational group primarily built up and taught in the related Master's Programme offered at the Department of Physical Geography. The subject name signifies our aim and efforts to link different water-science fields and components in this Master's Programme, in close connection with our research that also targets these linkages. The programme thus includes and couples the field of hydrology with primary focus on surface waters (streams, rivers, lakes), with that of hydrogeology, primarily focused on groundwater, and with soil water and groundwater-surface water interactions as key links between them, along with the resource and management aspects of water science that the water resources field primarily focuses on. 

The Master's Programme in Hydrology, Hydrogeology and Water Resources developed into one of the most popular and largest advanced-level programmes given at the Department of Physical Geography at Stockholm University. After more than a decade of giving this programme in the same form, we have now paused it for some time to enable us to focus and work on further developing and improving the water science education offered at Stockholm University. My own ongoing educational development efforts in this direction include, for example, projects that have received strategic Stockholm University and EU support, such as a project for developing Online-based sustainability-focused education on environmental system dynamics, and the European Erasmus+ project GeoVT - Training new generations on geomorphology, geohazards and geoheritage through Virtual Reality Technologies.

In PhD level education and supervision of early career scientists, I am or have been main adviser of 24 PhD-students and 16 post-doctoral fellows so far, of which 21 PhD students (15 at SU, 6 at KTH) and 14 postdocs have by now completed their dissertations, degrees and projects with me - see further specifications in CV-Destouni-January 2023 (249 Kb) . I also am or have been co-adviser of several more PhD students and postdocs. Many of the early career scientists I have advised and mentored have gained top positions as full, associate or tenure-track professors at universities, or as research leaders, senior or junior researchers or analysts at research institutes and other knowledge-based organizations and private companies in Sweden and other parts of the world.

Through my research I want to understand how Earth’s interconnected water system works and what drives it variations and changes around the world and at different scales, up to global.

I’m interested in the processes, variability and changes that characterize and determine the fluxes, levels, stores, availability and quality of water, and how they interact with society, climate, and ecosystems across various Earth System interfaces. I’m also interested in how improved scientific understanding can guide society’s management of critical water resources and water-related risks, for example, of droughts, floods, water pollution, and disease spreading.

I use both data-driven and model-based approaches to study and decipher these water aspects and interconnections. For example, I have worked with colleagues on the flux, quality, and management interactions of linked inland-coastal-marine water systems in the EU project COASTAL, and on climate and water-change effects on infectious diseases across the Nordic-Arctic region in a recently completed Nordic excellence project CLINF. I also work with research co-creation in collaboration with partners outside academia, for example, in an IoT innovation project (iWater) on water quality monitoring with machine-learning interpretation and cloud-linked communication of automatic sensor data, and a multi-actor participatory project on impacts and management of freshwater under current and future climate change, urbanization and other land-use changes.

For research projects, outputs and impact, see further my CV-Destouni-January 2023 (249 Kb)   Full publication list (611 Kb)  and Publications and citations in Google Scholar