Suzanne Hulscher, associate professor sea bed dynamics at Civil Engineering, earned the prize for an article on the development of sand waves and sand banks on the bottom of the North Sea, published last year in the Journal of Geophysical Research. A model developed by Hulscher provides more knowledge on the development and change of sand waves and banks in shallow seas. This knowledge can be applied when keeping open channels, laying cables and pipes in the sea bed and protecting the coast from heavy storms.
Do you feel it is important that there is a prize especially for female physicists?
'Women make a substantial contribution to physics and that is largely unknown. This prize is a good way to change that.'
The prize is meant to give an impulse to the career of the winner. What will it mean for yours?
'I don't know, time will tell. I do know what I want and if this prize can help, I would really like that. At the very least my field, sea bed dynamics, will get more attention because of it, and that is important to me. This prize shows that physics has links to other fields you may not suspect at first. My research takes place in between a lot of fields. For me that was a conscious choice, because I wanted to calculate things you can see and that people can really imagine.'
What will you do with the prize money?
'I will first check if I have to pay taxes on it. From whatever is left I will buy good photographic equipment, I may purchase a few scientific journals that the faculty does not have itself, and I will go to the coast for a weekend.'
For the sea and the sand dunes?
'Yes, for me the sea is a extraordinarily fascinating field of research. The funny thing is that so much is still unknown. There is so much to investigate. Especially now that the pressure on the land is increasing and there are more and more plans to use the sea. What happens if you interfere on a large scale in subtle balances? At this moment we cannot predict that. I do not expect that we can do that in detail in a few years, but with my research I do try to get a bit more grip on the possible consequences of such interventions.'
