While Elena already defended her Ph.D. thesis at beginning of this year, the Corona pandemic unfortunately prevented us from having the traditional award ceremony and most importantly the infamous kiss of the Göttingen „Gänseliesel“ until now. This lovely young metallic lady has been the target of generations of scientists after having received their doctoral degree, and more often than one might think the climb ended in wet clothes or minor injuries.
Elenas work has covered various aspects of flow dynamics in porous-fractured media, ranging from contact angle dynamics on rough surfaces, over instability formation in complex fractures and finally the coupling of Richards-type porous media with the Navier-Stokes realm. Her Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics model developments have largely contributed to a better understanding of flow processes in the vadose zone and demonstrate the powerful aspects of meshless modeling approaches for infiltration and recharge dynamics. As with every Ph.D. research an unknown number of problem remains to be solved and we are looking forward to tackle these in the future.
