Introduction Mirjam Blokker

My name is Mirjam Blokker and I have been working at KWR Water Research Institute since 2003 as a researcher in the drinking water infrastructure team. Since the beginning of 2020, I have been affiliated with TU Delft for one day a week, as an associate professor (although this has not yet been officially confirmed, because my appointment with the nomination committee would be on March 16, after it was decided on March 13 that universities were already going into lock down).

I did my MSc at TU Delft in applied physics, where during my thesis work in 1998 I was playing with lasers and doing optical image recognition. After that I worked in optical fibre telecommunication at Bell Labs, in the Dutch development team. Hard to imagine now, but the internet bubble burst in 2002, and in 2003 the research and development work worldwide was almost killed and together with all my Dutch colleagues I had to find another job. I decided that I wanted to work in another branch, and focus a bit more on research than on development. And I found the very interesting research institute KWR (Kiwa back then). Between 2006 and 2010 KWR allowed me to work on a PhD thesis, and every now and then I came to TU Delft, the water management department to discuss my progress.

The nice thing of doing a PhD at a company is that after you finish, the research still continues. My PhD thesis was about water demand modelling (SIMDEUM) and its application in water quality modelling in the drinking water distribution network. Since then SIMDEUM has been widely applied, and is recognized as a unique tool to get realistic demands and discharges; where realistic means that the model produces stochastic demands with realistic means and variances on a large temporal range (from 1 second to 1 minute to 1 day) and large spatial range (from the tap to the water meter to a building). The realistic time series can then be applied in hydraulic models (both upstream and downstream) to study the effect on flows, pressures and water quality.

I am excited about joining you at TU Delft and am looking forward to having interaction with young people through teaching and supervising research projects related to stochastic demand modelling and its applications. Especially applications in new areas, such as inside the building and in the sewer system. Research on (microbial) water quality in the drinking water distribution system also has a lot of potential. Furthermore, I have a large network in the Dutch drinking water utilities and some (relatively) practical knowledge of how things work in the a real system. So, if you want to know which utility may have certain problems or interests, and who to contact there, I may be of help. Thursdays I will be in Delft, once the lock down is released, but you can also contact me on other days.