dr.ir. SMT (Syed) Mustafa

I graduated from the Interuniversity Master of Water Resources Engineering combinedly from KU Leuven and Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium with Great Distinction. I obtained a PhD in Hydrogeology with the greatest distinction from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in Belgium. 

I work as an Assistant professor in Hydrogeology at the Hydrology and Environmental Hydraulics group at WUR. Before this, I was a postdoctoral research fellow, respectively, at the University of Oulu in Finland, the University of Aberdeen in the UK and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium. I also worked as a part-time guest professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium. I have been involved in teaching activities at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium, the University of Aberdeen in the UK, Bangladesh Agricultural University in Bangladesh and the University of Oulu in Finland.

Research projects:

I am currently leading several research projects: (i) as a Principal Investigator (PI, Dutch side) of the NWO-funded Coast-Water Solutions project; (ii) as a Co-Principal Investigator (Co-PI) of the EU Horizon-funded FARMWISE project; (iii) as a Co-Principal Investigator (Co-PI) of the EU Water4All-funded AquiCric project; and (iv) as a Co-Principal Investigator (Co-PI) of the UK-based GCRF and Scottish Funding Council-funded REWARD project. Regarding recently completed projects, I have also been involved in the EU H2020 WATERAGRI project and the UKRI-funded Connect4 Water Resilience project.

I am also (co) supervising three PhD research projects on: (i) Hydrogeological characterization of Gorongosa National Park and the impact of land use changes (PhD candidate: Thijs de Klein); (ii) Integrated assessment of managed aquifer recharge in Bangladesh (PhD candidate: Zamil Uddin); and (iii) The impact of drought and drought adaptation measures on groundwater availability in Flanders (PhD candidate: Lara Soeijer).

My research and interests focus on local- to regional-scale groundwater and crop–water systems, with an emphasis on quantitative modelling, uncertainty analysis, and integrative solutions for sustainable management and resilience to hydrological extremes. 

Within this, my work focuses on both fundamental, curiosity-driven research as well as applied research on: (i) numerical modelling & uncertainty analysis of groundwater flow and solute transport processes, (ii) sustainable groundwater resource development, management, and impact analysis, (iii) hydrological extremes and their interaction with human activities, (iv) groundwater-surface water interactions, and (v) crop water modelling and management. 

I developed a novel Integrated Bayesian Multi-model Uncertainty Estimation Framework (IBMUEF) to quantify input, parameter and conceptual model structure uncertainty in groundwater modelling. 

In this fully Bayesian framework, the DiffeRential Evolution Adaptive Metropolis (DREAM) algorithm with a novel likelihood function is combined with the Bayesian Combined Model Averaging (BCMA) to simultaneously quantify the uncertainty arising from the conceptual model structural, input and parameter of a fully distributed groundwater flow model. Groundwater recharge and groundwater abstraction multipliers are introduced to quantify the uncertainty of the spatially distributed input data of the groundwater model in addition to parameter uncertainty. Additionally, the proposed approach is applicable for all types of residual errors i. e. both for homoscedastic and heteroscedastic errors.