Judith Bosboom is a Senior Lecturer in the Hydraulic Engineering Department. She holds MSc and PhD degrees from Delft University of Technology in the field of coastal and hydraulic engineering and sciences. She has been professionally active in research, advise and teaching since 1995. Initially, she combined her academic research on nearshore hydrodynamics and sediment transport with advisory projects at the Netherlands-based, not-for-profit institute Delft Hydraulics (presently Deltares). In 2000, she decided to broaden her horizon and successfully continued her career as a management consultant and project manager. In this capacity, she — among other things — developed and delivered corporate training and coaching programs.

In 2007, Judith accepted an invitation — by the Department of Hydraulic Engineering of the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences of Delft University of Technology — to return to her earlier academic career. She was invited to redesign and update the three existing coastal MSc courses of in total 11 European credits. She transformed and extended the original course material, resulting into two new, highly central courses, viz. Coastal Dynamics I and Coastal Dynamics II. While responsible for both courses, she especially developed innovative teaching and examination methods for Coastal Dynamics I. 

In 2021, Judith has made the Coastal Dynamics lecture notes “open access” as a service to the national and international student communities. This Coastal Dynamics Open Textbook has become a popular resource in the coastal community, evident from the fact that it has been downloaded over 20,000 times from at least 46 countries in less than four years. At present, she is guiding the development of Jupyter Notebooks and Quizzes to add interactivity to the Open Textbook. 

Judith continues to teach in the MSc Hydraulic Engineering in both Coastal and Estuarine Systems (the new name of Coastal Dynamics 1) and a recent advanced module for Coastal Engineering students (which Coastal Dynamics 2 is now part of). Besides, she currently teaches Dynamics in the BSc Civil Engineering.

Her clear and enthusiastic teaching is greatly appreciated by students, evident from the fact that she received awards for “best lecturer in the MSc Hydraulic Engineering” in 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2022 and 2023. In 2016, this naturally culminated in both the best lecturer award for the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences and the best lecturer award for Delft University of Technology. 

While working at the Department of Hydraulic Engineering, Judith pursued a professional education in photography. In 2009, she obtained a BSc level degree from the Photo Academy in Amsterdam, with a specialization in architectural photography. In 2011, Judith decided to start a PhD study, tackling an issue that has intrigued her since her work at Delft Hydraulics in the nineties, viz. the quantification of the quality of coastal morphological predictions of numerical models simulating field observations or laboratory experiments. She defended successfully on January 16, 2020.

Her PhD thesis investigates the behaviour of the widely used mean-squared-error skill score with the initial bed as the reference, which goes by the name Brier skill score and presents three novel validation methods and corresponding error metrics that take the spatial structure of morphological patterns into account: 1) a field deformation or warping method, which deforms the predictions as to minimize the misfit with observations; 2) an optimal transport method, which moves misplaced sediment from the predicted to the observed morphology through an optimal, rotation-free sediment transport field; and 3) a scale-selective validation approach, which allows any metric to selectively address multiple spatial scales.