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Staff Overview

Tibor Stigter

Associate Professor of Hydrogeology and Groundwater Resources

Tibor Stigter

Tibor Stigter has over 15 years of experience in groundwater hydrological research, training and capacity building. He has worked in more than 20 projects in Europe, Africa and South America. His main areas of expertise are: i) groundwater sustainability and vulnerability assessment, under influence of climate variability and climate change; ii) use of hydrogeochemical, multivariate and geostatistical tools to assess groundwater-surface water-wetland interactions and contamination induced by agricultural practices.

Tibor Stigter obtained an MSc degree in Physical Geography/Geographical Hydrology in 1997 at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and a PhD degree in Engineering Sciences (2005) from Instituto Superior Tecnico - Universidade Tecnica de Lisboa (IST-UTL), based on his thesis "Integrated analysis of hydrogeochemistry and assessment of groundwater contamination induced by agricultural practices". During his PhD study he performed multivariate, geostatistical and hydrogeochemical modelling, as well as groundwater vulnerability assessment, based on data obtained in a South-European project in which he worked after moving to Portugal.

From 2005 to 2013 he worked with several Post-Doc grants, at Instituto do Mar (IMAR) and Universidade do Algarve (UALG) and later on with a fixed-term contract at IST Lisbon. During this time he pursued his research on hydrochemical and isotopic tracers of agricultural impacts on groundwater, as well as quantitative aspects of groundwater sustainability in semi-arid regions. He coordinated the European/North African project CLIMWAT (http://www.circle-med.net/) on the impact of climate change on coastal aquifers, and co-coordinated Portuguese projects on groundwater-surface water interactions in coastal wetlands. He became familiar with groundwater issues in Latin-America through his collaboration in the AQUIFERURAL network on sustainable aquifer management in rural areas and the FP7 project ADMICCO - adaptation to climate change in coastal vulnerable cities (www.admicco.labor.org.pe). Through collaboration in the RVO-CVC project ESCACES - Evaluacion de las aguas Subterraneas en Condiciones climAtiCas ExtremaS en el Valle del Cauca (2014-2016) he studiegroundwater-surface water-wetland interactions in the Cauca Valley in Colombia. In recent years he has also worked with social scientists in interdisciplinary approaches to addressing groundwater management issues.

Since August 2013 he works at IHE Delft as Sr. Lecturer in Hydrogeology and Groundwater Resources. Besides being envolved in research and capacity building projects, he is the coordinator of the Erasmus+ Mundus Joint Master Programme in Groundwater and Global Change - Impacts and Adaptation that he set up with European Funding. In addition, he is coordinator and lecturer of the yearly module and short course in Groundwater Data Collection and Interpretation. He further coordinates and provides training to students during the Hydrological Fieldwork in France (2 weeks) and during the Water Science and Engineering Groupwork (students from different disciplines working on a water resources master plan). He has supervised more than 25 Bsc, MSc, Post-MSc and PhD students. He has additional theoretical and practical training experience obtained during short courses he co-provided in Kenya, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Brazil, Argentina and the Caribbean, on Water Quality Monitoring and Assessment, Groundwater Resources Assessment and Water Resources Management.

Publications

A complete list of publications can be found in Google Scholar.