Bart van Westen is a PhD candidate at TU Delft, focusing on the interdisciplinary description of coastal systems and sandy nature-based solutions through the coupling of numerical models. His research combines his experience in coastal engineering and numerical modeling with an interest in exploring sustainable and innovative solutions for coastal management. His PhD research, which began as part of the Dutch Coastline Challenge (DCC), aims to identify and evaluate scalable, sustainable, and emission-free nourishment solutions for the Dutch coast. Currently, he is developing a coupling framework that runs models in series and enables the information exchange between existing process-based models. As a member of the AeoLiS-team, Bart continues to contribute to the model's development and its applications in the coastal engineering field.

Bart van Westen is a PhD candidate at TU Delft, working on the interdisciplinary description of coastal systems and sandy nature-based solutions through the coupling of numerical models. He holds a Master's degree from TU Delft, where, in collaboration with Deltares, he completed his thesis in 2018 on the implementation of dune development processes in the numerical model AeoLiS. After graduation, he started working at Deltares, during which he, amongst others, has contributed to the further development of AeoLiS, supported physical model testing in the Deltaflume, and computed wave impact with CFD modeling using OpenFOAM. In spring 2021, he started his PhD journey, focusing on the integrated modeling of coastal systems and linking marine and aeolian domains. His first two years as a PhD candidate were part of the Dutch Coastline Challenge (DCC), which sought to identify and evaluate innovative nourishment solutions for the Dutch coast that are scalable, sustainable, and emission-free.