Keynote Speakers - University of Waterloo

Dr. Kristen Splinter (she/her) is a Professor and Managing Director of the Water Research Laboratory at UNSW Sydney, Australia. Originally from Canada, her research focuses on understanding and predicting how coastlines change, from individual storms through to long-term coastal evolution. She works across shoreline monitoring, coastal erosion and recovery, remote sensing, and the development of next-generation coastal prediction models that combine physical understanding with data-driven and machine learning approaches.

Kristen is a member of the leadership team of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Our Future Oceans, where she contributes to interdisciplinary research supporting the resilience of coastal and marine environments. Her work is driven by a belief that better coastal futures depend on bringing together diverse knowledge, observations, and technologies to improve our understanding of dynamic coastal systems. She is also co-founder of Comomola (COastal MOrphodynamics and Machine LeArning), an international network connecting coastal scientists and machine learning researchers around the world.