Dr Maximillian Van Wyk de Vries

Senior Research Associate in Multi-hazard Risk Modelling

Academic Profile

Max Van Wyk de Vries is a Senior Research Associate in the Landscape Dynamics and Water research groups, School of Geography and the Environment.

Max is a geoscientist whose current work focuses on integrating remotely sensed, ground-based, and model datasets to investigate a variety of issues across the Earth Sciences. His current research is a part of the Sajag Nepal project investigating new ways to detect, monitor, and forecast landslides in Nepal. He completed his PhD at the University of Minnesota on the monitoring and modelling of geohazards in glaciated landscapes and the use of lake sediment records to reconstruct Southern Hemisphere paleoclimate at a high temporal resolution. Prior to joining the University of Oxford, he worked as a Post-doctoral Research Associate at the University of Liverpool on the dynamics of large Greenland outlet glaciers.

Most of his current work is focussed on landslides, but he is involved in long-term projects developping flexible remote-sensing workflows for the monitoring of change and surface displacements that are applicable to a wide range of geophysical processes, ranging from glacier and river flow to coseismic displacement. He has released several open-source software applications based on this work (e.g., https://maxvwdv.wixsite.com/home/giv) and is particularly interested in the detection of very small signals within noisy datasets and the quantification of their uncertainty. He is using the land surface model JULES to improve the representation of hydrological processes in Nepal, particularly antecedent soil moisture and has previously used the ISSM ice sheet model to investigate ice flow processes and glacier-landslide interactions.

Selected Publications

Please view a full list in my Google Scholar.

Dr Maximillian Van Wyk de Vries