EMS Young Scientist Award 2025: Timo Kelder
The recipient of the EMS Young Scientist Award 2025 is Timo Kelder, The Netherlands, working at the Climate Adaptation Services (CAS) in Bussum, The Netherlands. He was nominated with the publication “How to stop being surprised by unprecedented weather”, Timo Kelder et al., Nature Communications | ( 2025) 16:2382. This paper is a pioneering work that links disaster management and climate adaptation practices. It moreover promotes how society’s anticipation on unprecedented weather can promote climate resilience.
The EMS Awards Committee selected Timo Kelder as the awardee due to his proven record of combining and connecting fundamental research – as illustrated through the publication in Nature Communications – with climate adaptation services . He has already built an impressive career in which he has published 9 journal papers, reaching about 320 citations (April 2025), which is outstanding given his relatively recent PhD graduation in 2022.
Timo will provide the award lecture at the EMS2025 Session OSA3.5 on Deriving actionable information from climate data:
Award Lecture: How to stop being surprised by unprecedented weather
Timo Kelder is an expert in climate and weather extremes, working at the interface of science and actionable adaptation. During his PhD, Timo pioneered the use of large ensemble climate simulations to identify low-likelihood, high-impact events and help prepare for unprecedented weather. His vision is clear: we should stop being surprised by unprecedented weather — and start preparing for it. He initiated the first EGU sessions on high impact weather extremes, and, from that community, led the development of the first comprehensive overview of how we can anticipate unprecedented events and build resilience to their impacts. Through this effort, he brought together experts from across disciplines into the collaborative ‘UNSEEN network,’ advancing methods to detect and interpret rare extremes. Born in Curaçao, he now channels this scientific insight into action, coordinating regional adaptation efforts in the Dutch Caribbean. At CAS, he leads the development of the Climate Impact Atlas for the Dutch Caribbean, while serving as a guest researcher in the Climate Extremes Group at VU-IVM, bridging practice and science to better prepare for future extremes.
As a climate scientist, Timo is committed to better prepare the world for climate extremes. Performing research motivates him enormously, as does translating the outcome of the research, and insights from publicly available climate data into useful information for climate adaptation in society, like in this story about potential heat extremes in the Netherlands based on scientific insights: Unseen heat
Moreover he has a passion for open science, reproducibility and transparency, which is expressed in his GitHub repository (https://github.com/timokelder) where research data and software is shared. Finally, Timo also strongly promotes cross border collaboration, e.g. through the EU REACHOUT project in which a network of European cities was built to promote their urban climate resilience.
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