Welcome to my website!
My name is Lisanne Braat, and I am a Dutch geomorphologist. On this website, I share my research and related activities. I hope to give some insight into the research that I do, but also in the life of an Earth (and Mars) scientist that gets to visit great places around the world. There are many videos to be found on my website because making videos is one of my hobbies! But don't forget to take a look at my blog as well.
Current Postdoc research
Currently I work as a research fellow at the European Space Agency (ESTEC). Here, I study deltas on Mars. Early Mars was a water-rich planet with rivers, lakes, and possibly an ocean. By using morphological numerical modeling, so far only applied to Earth, I reconstruct deltas that are now still visible on satellite images and hope to learn more about the hydro-morphological processes that shaped the surface of Mars. This work is a continuation from my PostDoc research at Caltech (the California Institute for Technology) in the USA, which was financed by a Rubicon fellowship from the Dutch Research Council (Dutch: NWO).
Past PhD research
I obtained my PhD on the 10th of May 2019 at the Department of Physical Geography (Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands). My PhD research was about the sedimentology and morphodynamics of estuaries with sand and mud and was part of the NWO Vici project "Turning the Tide". The different sediment characteristics of mud and sand have implications for the large-scale shape and dynamics of estuaries. During my PhD I studied these effects. For part of my research I conducted scaled, physical (flume) experiments in the Metronome tidal facility, where we used periodic tilting of the flume to simulate ebb and flood currents. Furthermore, I used fieldwork and numerical modeling (Delft3D) to study the effect of mud supply on the morphodynamics.
If you have questions about my research or making science movies, do not hesitate to contact me!