Biography
Claudia Ruz Vargas is a researcher at the International Groundwater Resources Assessment Centre (IGRAC), in Delft, the Netherlands. Through her work at IGRAC, she became a steward for the Essential Climate Variable (ECV) Groundwater at the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS), a programme co-sponsored by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (IOC-UNESCO), UN Environment, and the International Science Council (ISC). She is also member of the Friends of Groundwater (FoG), a workstream of the World Water Quality Alliance (WWQA) initiated by UN Environment, and contributes actively to the Commission on Groundwater Quality of the International Association of Hydrogeologists (IAH-GQC).
Her position at IGRAC allowed her to contribute to several international projects and initiatives with various partners, such as the World Water Development Report (WWDR) 2022, the Global Gravity-based Groundwater Product (G3P) project, the WMO Global Hydrological Status and Outlook System (HydroSOS), and the Groundwater Resources Governance in Transboundary Aquifers (GGRETA) project, among. These projects align with Claudia's main interest, which is to reveal the status and trends of groundwater on a global scale, in terms of quantity and quality, and to support initiatives to protect this important resource.
Claudia graduated from civil engineering at the University of Santiago, Chile, and later on from the prestigious Erasmus Mundus Joint M. Sc. on Groundwater and Global change (GroundwatCH). Prior to join IGRAC, Claudia gathered experience as a project engineer, university lecturer, teaching assistant, and as a volunteer during earthquake relief.