Over the course of the 2020 summer, several personal grants were awarded for PhD research in our team. Harro Jongen recently joined the team in November 2020, funded by a personal PhD grant from the Wageningen Institute for Environment and Climate Research (WIMEK) graduate programme. He will work on the coupling between heat and drought in urban environments under supervision of Ryan Teuling and Gert-Jan Steeneveld. In August 2020, Bob Zwartendijk received a “Doctoral Grant for Teachers” from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for his proposal “To plant or not to plant: Can dry season stream flow in tropical areas subject to long-term slash-and-burn agriculture be enhanced by reforestation?”. This grant will allow him to continue his research on the effect of changes in forest cover on hydrological drought in Madagascar. He will be supervised by Ryan Teuling, Sampurno Bruijnzeel, and Ilja van Meerveld.
The Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC) funded 2 proposals for PhD research. Jingwei Zhou, who obtained his MSc degree from the Australian National University in Canberra, received a grant to carry out his PhD research on “Global Assessment of Land Cover Contribution to Droughts and Heatwaves”. Linqi Zhang, who is currently working on his PhD research at Hohai University (Nanjing), obtained a scholarship to join our team for a period of 12 months starting in 2021. He will work on the development mechanism and quantitative assessment of flash drought.