Katerina is a Professor of Dryland Hydrology in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol, the co-lead of the Water Theme of the Cabot Institute for the Environment, and an Associate Researcher in the Earth Research Institute at University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). She received both her BSc in Geography and PhD in Hydrology of Arid Environments from King’s College London. She comes from the Mediterranean island of Cyprus which forms a big part of the inspiration and fascination with arid environments.

Katerina's research focuses on dryland environments in two major strands: 1) theoretical work on dryland hydrology, Earth surface processes, and landform development; 2) applied research on climate impacts on human society in dryland regions. She has been awarded major funding (~£2.6M) for this work, which is focused within her Dryland Research Group. Her research has contributed substantially to the theoretical understanding of landscape evolution and erosion, with papers published in Nature (2019, 2022) and Earth Surface Dynamics (2022), to new knowledge of how the water balance in drylands responds to climate change (in Science 2024), and to the production of new open-source models and open-access global datasets for hydrological applications, which are being widely used. Katerina was awarded a University Research Fellowship for 2023 and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for 2024 to research hydrological signatures of aridity.

Katerina has been awarded research grants from many funders including the UKRI Global Challenges Research Fund, the Royal Society, the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), and the EU Horizon 2020 program.

For further information on Katerina’s research please go to the Dryland Research Group website (http://michaelides.eri.ucsb.edu/).