Principal Investigators

Anna Kiriliouk (coordinator) is an assistant professor in Statistics at the Institut de statistique, biostatistique et sciences actuarielles of the UCLouvain. Her main research field is extreme value theory, with a focus on environmental applications, the development of statistical methodology for multivariate extremes, high-dimensional modelling, and spatial extremes.

Francesco Ragone is an associate professor at the Mathematical and Computational Modelling group of the University of Leicester. His research interests focus on the application of techniques from statistical physics and dynamical systems theory to the study of climate problems.

François Massonnet is an F.R.S.-FNRS Research Associate and part-time lecturer at the Earth and Climate Centre of the UCLouvain. His research interests focus on seasonal to interannual predictability and prediction of sea ice, the evaluation of climate models in polar regions, data assimilation and forecast verification.

Johan Segers is a professor at Department of Mathematics of the KULeuven and the Institut de statistique, biostatistique et sciences actuarielles of the UCLouvain. His research is anchored in mathematical statistics and applied probability. His main research themes are extreme value analysis, dependence modelling, optimal transport, and Monte Carlo integration.

Hugues Goosse is research director with the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (F.R.S.-FNRS) and professor at the UCLouvain. His research is devoted to the development of climate models, model-data comparison and the application of models to study past, current and future climate change, analyzing both natural variability and the response to human-induced perturbations. His recent work is focused on sea-ice-ocean-atmosphere interactions in the Southern Ocean, decadal to centennial climate variations over the past millennium and data assimilation using ensemble methods in climate models.

Researchers

Robert Paulus is a PhD student at UCLouvain and UNamur under the supervision of Anna Kiriliouk and Francesco Ragone. His research aims to enhance our understanding of extreme flooding events across Europe by developing innovative and flexible univariate visualization tools to provide robust, location-specific estimates of intense flooding occurrences. He is particularly focused on studying recent catastrophic flood events, such as those in Belgium, Germany, and Spain, and exploring the influence of global warming on these extraordinary precipitation events.

Paolo Besana is a PhD student at the UCLouvain, conducting research under the supervision of Hugues Goosse, Francesco Ragone and Johan Segers. His main research focuses on extreme value theory applied to climate science. Currently, his work centres on the attribution of European droughts, exploring the interaction between natural variability and human-induced climate change.

Kamal Gasser is a PhD student at UCLouvain under the supervision of Johan Sergers and Francesco Ragone. His research focuses on exploring compound event attribution and spatial extremes. By developing advanced statistical methodologies, his work aims to deepen the understanding of complex climate phenomena and their far-reaching impacts.

Alexandre Tytgat is a PhD student at UCLouvain under the supervision of François Massonnet and Anna Kiriliouk. His research focuses on improving our understanding of unprecedented sea ice extent lows in the Antarctic region by providing robust estimates of their probabilities and quantifying the contributions of key drivers. He is particularly interested in the regional dynamics of sea ice within the various Antarctic basins and the role of specific drivers in these extremes, as well as the implications for current and future climate conditions. To this end, he aims to develop novel non-stationary multivariate models and attribution techniques tailored to Antarctic sea ice extent extremes.