Dr. Martine Rutten

Martine is a PlanAdapt Fellow, partly based in Berlin, Germany and partly in Breda, The Netherlands.

She is an experienced leader in higher education and research organisations, with a deep commitment to leveraging transdisciplinary learning for sustainable water resources management and climate adaptation. She has 20 year’s work experience as an educator, researcher and capacity-builder in the Netherlands, South-East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Her experience includes course and curriculum development, training of trainers, applied interdisciplinary research projects acquisition and execution, and innovation and start-up support. Her courses are based on active learning principles and challenge student’s critical thinking.

She has led higher education curriculum development projects in the Netherlands, Vietnam and Myanmar. Her research projects have been driven by practical problems, solution-oriented and in intensive collaboration with public and private actors. She masters a broad spectrum of qualitative and quantitative research methods as well as participatory and design-based methods. For the field lab for sustainable innovation The Green Village, Martine set up a learning community. Currently, as a freelance researcher, educator and hiking guide, she has worked on the implementation of Climate Information Systems in Surinam, urban tree health education programs for school children and development of nature retreats combining hiking with breathwork for mental clarity.

Martine holds a PhD degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Delft University of Technology and a Teaching Qualification for Higher Education from the Free University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Martine is also a certified mountain hiking guide.

For more information see Martine’s LinkedIn page.

Examples of Martine’s education development projects:

RElastiCity: Frame games as Teaching Methodology in Higher Education Frame Game as Teaching Methodology in Higher Education: The Case of RElastiCity

Blue Engineering: an interdisciplinary course for engineers about socio-environmental responsibility TU Delft:Start – Blue Engineering

Delta Futures Lab: a multidisciplinary learning network for students with the ambition to become the future interdisciplinary leaders in spatial design, engineering and governance of deltas Delta Futures Lab

Examples of research for development and capacity-building programs in which Martine played a key role:

Integrated water resources management for Myanmar Myanmar

Navigating the Future: Building resilient deltas in Vietnam Navigating the Future: Building resilient deltas in Vietnam

A selection of publications:

Amdar, N., Seyoum, S., Al-Bakri, J., Rutten, M.M. et al. (2024). Developing a water budget for the Amman-Zarqa basin using water accounting plus and the pixel-based soil water balance model. Model. Earth Syst. Environ.

Tran, H. N., Rutten, M.M., Prajapati, R., Tran, H. T., Duwal, S., Nguyen, D. T., … & Miegel, K. (2024). Citizen scientists’ engagement in flood risk-related data collection: a case study in Bui River Basin, Vietnam. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 196(3), 280.

Potter, E. F., Monney, I., & Rutten, M.M. (2023). Bridging the data gap: using remote sensing and open-access data for assessing sustainable groundwater use in Kumasi, Ghana. Journal of Water and Climate Change, 14(9), 3237-3256.

Geleijnse, J., Rutten, M.M., De Villiers, D., Bamwenda, J. T., & Abraham, E. (2023). Enhancing water access monitoring through mapping multi-source usage and disaggregated geographic inequalities with machine learning and surveys. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 13433.

Van Emmerik, T., Seibert, J., Strobl, B., Etter, S., Den Oudendammer, T., Rutten, M.M., … & van Meerveld, I. (2020). Crowd-based observations of riverine macroplastic pollution. Frontiers in earth science, 8, 298.

Ko, N. T., Suter, P., Conallin, J., Rutten, M.M., & Bogaard, T. (2020). Aquatic Macroinvertebrate Community Changes Downstream of the Hydropower Generating Dams in Myanmar-Potential Negative Impacts From Increased Power Generation. Frontiers in Water, 2, 57.

Davids, J. C., Devkota, N., Pandey, A., Prajapati, R., Ertis, B. A., Rutten, M. M. & van de Giesen, N. (2019). Soda bottle science-citizen science monsoon precipitation monitoring in Nepal. Frontiers in Earth Science, 7, 46..