Principal Investigators

Anna Kiriliouk (coordinator) is an assistant professor in Statistics at the Department of Mathematics and the Economics, Management, Communication and Politics faculty of the University of Namur (UNamur). 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. Recently, she has been particularly interested in topics related to the climate sciences, such as climate extreme event attribution and compound extremes.

Francesco Ragone (coordinator UCLouvain) is an assistant professor at the Earth and Climate Centre of the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) and senior researcher at the Royal Meteorological Institute (RMI) of Belgium. My 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 the Institut de statistique, biostatistique et sciences actuarielles of the Université catholique de Louvain (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-Belgium) and professor at the Université de Louvain in Belgium where he teaches climate related topics. 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 in Statistics at Université de Namur under the supervision of Anna Kiriliouk and Francesco Ragone. His research focuses on Work Package 1, exploring attribution of European floods.

Paolo Besana is a PhD student at the Université Catholique de Louvain, conducting research under the supervision of Hugues Goosse and Francesco Ragone. 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 in Statistics at Université Catholique de Louvain under the supervision of Johan Sergers and Francesco Ragone. His research focuses on Work Package 2, 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 Université Catholique de Louvain 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.