Manuela Brunner is an assistant professor at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science at ETH Zurich and the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF in Davos. Before moving to Davos, she studied Geography and Climate Sciences at the University of Bern, obtained a PhD from the Universities of Zurich and Grenoble-Alpes, and did postdocs at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder Colorado. Her research focuses on extreme climatic and hydrological events such as floods and droughts. She studies the hydro-meteorological drivers of extreme events, develops methods for their prediction, and assesses changes in the water cycle and extremes. Her group at ETH and SLF studies water and climate extremes in mountain regions under global change and focuses on three core areas:
(1) Understanding processes governing multivariate hydro-climatic extreme events;
(2) Assessing climate impacts on water and climate extremes in mountain regions with a particular focus on the Alps; and
(3) Improving predictions of extreme events by exploiting new datasets and the latest methodological advances in statistics, data science, and climate modeling.