We are proud to share that our Chief Representative, Bee Kothuis, has been appointed Distinguished Partner of the Institute for a Disaster Resilient Texas (IDRT) at Texas A&M University at Galveston. The Distinguished Partners program brings together leading academics, practitioners, and public-sector leaders who contribute to advancing flood resilience research, innovation, and policy solutions in Texas and beyond. As part of this network, Bee joins a select group of experts dedicated to strengthening disaster resilience across communities, coastlines, and critical infrastructure.
Bee’s appointment highlights more than a decade of close Dutch-Texas collaboration in food protection, coastal engineering, and multidisciplinary research. Her lecture at IDRT, delivered before faculty, students, and long-standing collaborators, reflected on this decade-spanning partnership and the many bridges between knowledge institutions, governments, and industry across both regions. Her talk emphasized that real resilience begins long before any levee or storm barrier is built; it starts with people working together across disciplines, cultures, and borders to design better futures.
As a design anthropologist turned flood resilience specialist, Bee has played a unique linking role in the Dutch-Texas exchange. Her work ranges from early collaboration between TU Delft, the SSPEED Center, and Texas A&M, to coordinating the NSF PIRE and IRES research programs, to supporting bilateral visits involving Rijkswaterstaat, USACE, GCPD, TGLO and other local leaders. She has helped cultivate the “triple helix” model in this realm, by connecting academia, government, and industry as a foundation for long-term, trusted collaboration.
In her lecture, she underscored why these partnerships matter now more than ever. Both the Netherlands and Texas face the mounting pressure of sea-level rise, stronger storms, and growing populations in flood-prone regions. Each is undertaking some of the most ambitious coastal protection programs in the world from the Dutch Delta Works and Room for the River to the Coastal Texas Project currently moving into design and implementation. These challenges demand innovation, new materials, nature-based approaches, and integrated inland-coastal strategies. International collaboration accelerates this learning.
As Distinguishes Partner, Bee will continue to work closely with IDRT in fostering neutral platforms where Dutch and Texan experts can connect, exchange, and innovate. This partnership reinforces a shared mission: to develop the next generation of flood resilience solutions for the communities of both Texas and the Netherlands, and to ensure that collaboration, curiosity, and trust remain at the heart of that effort.