Ir. Eva Nieuwenhuis

Eva Nieuwenhuis has started her PhD in February 2017. She analyses Dutch urban drainage systems in transition and is researching how the urban drainage sector should deal with the uncertainties of a multi-actor context.

Eva has a bachelors’ degree in Industrial Design Engineering at the University of Delft. During her bachelors, she followed a minor Water Engineering and Management. Eva then also conducted a groundwater research on Bonaire. The minor and her research experiences on Bonaire convinced her to start a bridging program. After a fulltime year in Student Council, she switched to the master Water Management at the same university.

During her masters, she did an exchange semester at Chalmers University of Technology (Gothenburg). She also went to Jona (Switzerland) for an internship at Geberit International AG, where she conducted market research on integrated water systems for the Indian market. Back in the Netherlands, Eva finished her masters: under the supervision of Fraçois Clemens and Jeroen Langeveld, she wrote her thesis about the relationship between Fat, Oil and Grease (FOG) disposal patterns and FOG deposits in sewer systems. During her master thesis, she developed her interest in the field of urban drainage and the interaction between people and technology: how the system is designed, how people eventually use the system and how this affects system behavior again.

In February 2017, she started as a PhD candidate. Her research project focuses on sewer asset management in the Netherlands and multi-actor decision-making. In the upcoming decades, many sewers have to be replaced. For such replacement projects, we have to deal with lots of future uncertainties, such as climate change, stricter emission laws and increasing economic concerns. Since the sewer system is part of the entire urban water system, there are many different actors involved. This increases the complexity of the decisions-making process, as the actors all have different interests and responsibilities. Her research focuses on the question how we have to deal with uncertainty and complexity in this multi-actor environment to obtain a well-performing urban drainage system.

Eva’s research is a collaboration between the section Sanitary Engineering (Water Management - Civil Engineering) and the section Organization & Governance (Multi-Actor Systems - Technology Policy Management). She is working with Jeroen Langeveld (Sanitary Engineering) and Hans de Bruijn (Organization & Governance)