Louise J. Slater
GM Geomorphology
The 2021 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is awarded to Louise J. Slater for recognition of outstanding contributions in the field at the interface of river geomorphology and hydrology; exploring the drivers of changing flood hazard and risk over time and space.
Slater’s research is at the interface of geomorphology and hydrology. Her research is vital as she seeks to understand the impacts of climate change on river system function and the influence this has on flood hazard and risk more broadly, specifically addressing the broad field of how the drivers and controls of flooding vary over time.
Louise J. Slater is leading approaches internationally to explore the dynamism within river systems, including how flow discharges are changing in time and space, and is exploring the impacts of a range of climatic, geomorphological, and hydrological processes on flood hazard and risk. She is pioneering and deploying a range of novel techniques, exploiting advances in big-data mining, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to unlock archives of data within standardized hydrological datasets. Through this highly innovative work, she is uniquely coupling the hydrological sciences and the geomorphological sciences in new and exciting ways.
Slater has already been awarded a diverse portfolio of research income, is an active partner in international research teams, and has begun to build a coherent and distinctive group at Oxford. She has led her scientific community through organizing sessions at major conferences, including EGU, convening specialist conferences, and is presently serving on the British Society of Geomorphologists Executive Committee as well as serving as an editor for the EGU journal HESS.
Slater’s abilities and capabilities set a very promising longer-term career trajectory, which will result in her very rapidly becoming a world-leading authority in the broad field of flood science. For all these reasons, she is a very worthy recipient of the Geomorphology Division’s Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award.