n March 1st, Dr. Dingzhu Liu joined our section as an OCPC-Helmholtz post-doctoral fellow. The OCPC-Helmholtz fellowship is co-funded by the Helmholtz Association and the Office of China Postdoc Council to support outstanding Chinese post-doctoral talents and to strengthen the cooperation between Helmholtz Research Centers and Chinese partner institutions.

Dr. Dingzhu Liu will work with Dr. Hui Tang, Prof. Dr. Jean Braun, and Dr. Jens Turowski from Section 4.6: Geomorphology. His work will focus on understanding how debris flows and landslides change landscapes. To do that, he will integrate extreme short-term processes, such as landslides and debris flows, into a long-term landscape evolution model to form a multi-scale landscape evolution model.

Dr. Dingzhu Liu recently finished his Ph.D. at the Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His Ph.D. work mainly focused on earthen dam breaches, outburst floods, and submarine debris flows through physical experiments and numerical modeling. He is also a member of the NSFC-GFZ joint project: Understanding the seismic response of large-scale landslide and debris flows for developing disaster risk early warning methods, headed by Dr. Jens Turowski.