Mariana Madruga de Brito

NH Natural Hazards

The 2025 Arne Richter Award for Outstanding Early Career Scientists is awarded to Mariana Madruga de Brito for outstanding contributions to understanding of the socio-economic impacts and risk mitigation of extreme hydrological events, using natural language processing and social science computational methods.

Mariana de Brito's research focuses on societal issues related to extreme hydro-climatic events. She uses long-term monitoring of climate impacts on society through quantitative methods and natural language processing. She holds an MSc in Environmental Engineering from the University of Porto Alegre, Brazil, and completed her PhD at Bonn University, Germany, in 2018, specializing in participatory approaches for assessing flood vulnerabilities. At the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Leipzig, Germany, she has been building a lively and diverse research group on Computational Sociology for Extreme Events.

Among her key scientific contributions, de Brito developed a framework for a participatory multi-criteria decision-making approach to flood vulnerability assessment, considering the interdependence among various vulnerability criteria. This framework was adopted by various institutions and has significantly influenced disaster risk management in Brazil. She is also pioneering the use of natural language processing in multi-hazard risk research. Her innovative use of text as data and computational social science methods has revolutionized our ability to identify and analyze natural hazard impacts across diverse sectors and scales.

She has been involved in several research projects on floods and droughts and has co-supervised seven PhD students since 2019. Mariana de Brito is also an inspirational speaker and mentor, actively promoting diversity and inclusion in science through initiatives such as Women in Machine Learning.