Caroline Katsman is Associate Professor in Physical Oceanography at Delft University of Technology, focusing on the large-scale ocean circulation and its role for climate. She is also a guest researcher at the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht (IMAU) at Utrecht University. 

She holds an MSc in Meteorology and Physical Oceanography from Utrecht University (1996, cum laude). She received her PhD from that university in 2001, on a research project on the wind-driven ocean circulation carried out at both at KNMI and Utrecht University. As a postdoctoral scholar at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (USA), she shifted focus to the role of ocean eddies (whirls in the ocean) for the circulation in the Labrador Sea (2001-2003).   

She returned to KNMI as a climate researcher in 2003. There, she further developed her specific field of expertise: the role of the ocean in the current and future climate, with an emphasis on ocean warming and future sea level change. Besides her scientific work, she advised the Dutch government on coastal defense policy strategies, based on the scenarios for regional sea level change she developed with co-workers at Utrecht University and Delft University of Technology. In 2008, she published extreme high-end scenarios for local sea level rise at the request of the “Nieuwe Delta Commissie” (a state committee installed by the Dutch government to assess the country’s flood defense strategies in light of future climate change).

In 2014, she received a personal mid-career grant (NWO-VIDI grant) to study how ocean eddies govern the response of the ocean circulation to high-latitude climate change. In that same year she became an Associate Professor in Physical Oceanography at Delft University of Technology, at the faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Environmental Fluidmechanics section.