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Chairpersons/Lecturers
Dr. Mengzhen Xu is currently the Director of the River Research Institute, Tsinghua University. She holds a Doctoral degree in Hydraulic Engineering (Tsinghua University) awarded in 2012. After two years as a scientific researcher in the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate, Oslo, Norway, working on the impact of climate change on sediment transport in rivers, she was appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Hydraulic Engineering, Tsinghua University. She was promoted as Associate Professor in 2017 and at the same time was nominated as the Director of the River research Institute. She has served is an Executive Committee Member in the International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research China (Mainland) Chapter (IAHR China) since 2017, and as a Board Member of the IAHR Committees on River, Coastal, and Estuarine Morphodynamics (RCEM), and Ecohydraulics since 2018. Her research projects cover a wide range of topics in eco-hydraulics, eco-sedimentation, and geomorphology, such as landscape evolution and natural hazards, channel stability and morphology, stream ecology, fish migration and cavefish conversation, the interaction between river dynamics and aquatic ecosystems, hydraulic engineering and mussel invasion and its control etc. Field observation and model development have been very important components of her research, with considerable experimental flume work used to complement field data. She has published more than 70 peer-reviewed papers in international journals and conference proceedings, and Chinese journals, and co-authored two English monographs and two Chinese monographs.