Kate Giannini, program manager for IIHR—Hydroscience and Engineering (IIHR) in the College of Engineering, has been awarded a Fulbright and will be hosted by Deltares, located in Delft, Netherlands, for a six-week exchange beginning at the end of December 2025.
Her upcoming opportunity is part of the Fulbright Specialist Program, which supports experienced professionals in educational exchange projects with institutions around the world. This program encourages positive impacts on communities abroad and provides recipients with knowledge and connections that support their work and research when they return.
Giannini, who graduated from Upper Iowa University in 2006 with a Bachelor of Science in conservation management, has been curious about water from a young age, often finding herself wading through and exploring creeks. Her childhood curiosity has developed into a respected career dedicated to conservation and watershed management.
In her role at IIHR, Giannini leads partner engagement and strategic development that strengthens flood resilience and water quality initiatives across Iowa. Her emphasis on community building—connecting tools, data, and resources with local partners—closely aligns with Deltares’s mission, creating opportunities for a mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and expertise.
“Deltares is well-known internationally and has similar programs to IIHR, such as physical modeling, watershed management, water quality, drought, and flood resilience,” said Giannini. “Through this experience, my goal is to explore opportunities for collaboration to advance Deltares’s FloodAdapt model and see if we can do a pilot project in Iowa or within the Upper Mississippi River Basin using their model.”
FloodAdapt, a model developed by Deltares, helps communities understand and plan for future flooding. With FloodAdapt, users and decision-makers can explore flood scenarios, evaluate adaptation strategies, and gather actionable insights to better understand potential impacts on communities and critical infrastructure.
This work closely aligns with the mission of IIHR’s Iowa Flood Center (IFC) that provides advanced flood monitoring and prediction tools. The IFC-developed Iowa Flood Information System (IFIS) web-based platform gives Iowans access to community-specific flood alerts and forecasts, interactive flood maps, real-time weather conditions, and a range of related visualizations, and it is often looked to as a model by other states.
The Fulbright opportunity builds on past collaborations between IIHR and Deltares focused on citizen science–based water-quality monitoring initiatives. IIHR leads a statewide water-quality monitoring network that is one of the most robust and dense across the U.S. Its Iowa Water Quality Information System (IWQIS) provides publicly available real-time data on nitrate levels, pH, dissolved oxygen, discharge rates, temperature, and more. These efforts complement similar work Deltares is leading focused on water and health.
Together, these shared areas of expertise create a strong foundation for innovation and partnership between these two distinguished programs. “I’m really excited because I think there’s a lot of value in our two institutes working together,” said Giannini. “There’s an opportunity to leverage the work we’ve done in Iowa to strengthen their model and exchange ideas and resources that will influence each other’s programs and initiatives.”
During the visit, Giannini will spend time meeting with potential collaborators, sharing information about the work being done at IIHR and IFC, and exploring field demonstration sites of projects addressing similar research interests, including floods, drought, water quality, soil health, watershed management, and community building. She is excited to bring new ideas and lessons learned back to Iowa to help shape climate adaptation strategies and build more resilient communities.