Meet the team

The fellow

Itxaso Odériz

Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow

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Itxaso is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow in the Climate Risks, Adaptation, and Resilience Group. Her current work focuses on coastal adaptation to climate change, to achieve comprehensive adaptation at a global scale by combining multi-scale processes.

She holds a degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Cantabria. She has a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in engineering, both with honours from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Throughout her career, she has studied several spatial scales, from implementing nature-based solutions at the local level to analysing coastal hazards at a global scale, integrating natural variability and climate change. In her Ph.D., she assessed the impact of natural variability and climate change on global wave climate.

She was a visiting researcher at the Disaster Prevention Research Institute at Kyoto University, where she focused on wave climate projections under climate change scenarios. Additionally, she has been a Juan de la Cierva researcher, during this period she focused on developing a long-term climate risks assessment at global scale. Her work has been published in high-impact journals, including the prestigious Nature Climate Change.

Currently, she leads the TRANSCLIMA project, which aims to develop narratives for climate change adaptation in coastal areas, evaluating unprecedented hazards arising from the shifts of tropical and extratropical cyclones. She is also part of the TROPICANA (TROPIcal Cyclones in the Anthropocene: Physics, Simulations & Attribution) project, a working network that establishes criteria for advancing the study of tropical cyclones in the context of climate change, involving experts from over 10 countries and the most relevant institutions in the field of tropical cyclones.

The supervisor

Iñigo Losada is Professor and Director of Research of IHCantabria where he served as the founding Director (2007-2011). In UC, as an Associate Professor first and as Full Professor (1999), his research has embraced: coastal dynamics and its relation with coastal protection; climate change and coastal risk and the development of ocean energy. From 2000-2004 he served as Director of the Water Science Technology and Environment Department and as a Member of the Scientific Panel for the Strategic Coordination of Marine Spills of the Ministry of Science and Technology, created in response to the Prestige Oil Spill. From 2008-2011 he was the Coordinator of the Spanish National Agency for Research Evaluation and Prospective (ANEP) in the field of Civil Engineering. Since 2012 he serves as Coordinator of the Area of Water and Energy of Cantabria Campus International (CCI), one of the few Spanish Excellence Campus, having obtained the highest recognition by the International Evaluation Panel.

Losada was the PI of the proposal and serves as Scientific Director since 2007 of the Cantabria Coastal and Ocean Basin.

From 2010-2014 he has been the only Spanish Researcher Coordinating Leading Author of the IPCC report. He has been PI in more than 30 research projects. With over 200 publications, he has published more than a 130 refereed journal papers in top ranked journals including Nature Climate Change or Nature Communications.

Prof. Losada has been the PI or collaborated in more than 80 projects on technology transfer. He has coordinated projects for: CEPAL-UN, FAO, UNDP, Environment Canada, Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), World Bank (WB), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), Spanish and international Ministries of the Environment and Climate Change Units, the Council of Europe, the European Commission and international governments.

He has been awarded by many excellent awards, such us the G. Moffatt and Frank E. Nichol Award of the ASCE (2014), Rei Jaume I Prize for Environmental Protection and elected member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering (2014), Academic appointment of the European Academy of Sciences (2020), Leonardo Torres Quevedo National Research Award in the field of engineering (2022).