Larisa Tarasova

Dr. Larisa Tarasova is a tenured Research Group Leader of "Watershed Dynamics & Hydrological Extremes" at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Department of Catchment Hydrology, Germany. She leads projects on large-scale flood analysis, catchment regionalization and hydrological modelling uncertainty, and has published extensively on these topics since 2016.

Education:

• PhD in Hydrology, Department of Catchment Hydrology, UFZ (2016-2020)
• M.Sc. Water Resources & Environmental Management, Leibniz University Hannover (2013-2015)
• B.Sc. Ecology & Environmental Engineering, Peoples' Friendship University of Russia (2007-2012)
• International exchange semesters at Nanjing Normal University and Xiamen University, China

Research interests revolve around understanding and predicting hydrological extremes across large domains. She develops data-driven and process-based approaches to classify flood events, quantify their space-time dynamics, and unravel how catchment properties and climate patterns control runoff generation. Her work integrates statistical learning, large-sample datasets (e.g., CAMELS-DE) and uncertainty analysis to improve predictive models for floods and water quality under change.

Her publications (≥60 peer-reviewed since 2016) exhibit a clear trajectory from event-based process studies to continental-scale modelling and machine-learning applications, culminating in recent high-impact papers on compound flood drivers, catchment descriptors and neural-network flood forecasting.

Scientific awards include the Gordon Research Conference Rising Star Award, AGU and Wiley citations for excellence, and national Best Dissertation and UFZ Best PhD awards in 2021, underlining her early-career leadership.

She convenes sessions on hydrometeorological extremes at EGU and AGU meetings, serves as reviewer for top journals (Science, Nature Climate Change, WRR, etc.) and acts as referee for NSF and Hungarian Academy grant programmes, underlining her active service to the community.