Annelies Johanna de Kock

Annelies de Kock had a rule for meetings: if nobody has laughed in the first ten minutes, somebody has to be told off. She rarely had to enforce it, because she was usually the one laughing, a loud, unguarded laugh that carried down the corridors of the Faculty of Civil Engineering at TU Delft.

She was born in Eindhoven in 1980, the daughter of a Philips engineer and a primary school teacher, and grew up with a father who told stories about a country on the other side of the world. She studied civil engineering at TU Delft, took her master's in hydraulic engineering in 2004 and a doctorate in 2009 on how storm surges behave when they meet a river delta. Her work at Deltares and TU Delft helped the Netherlands, and later Indonesia, think about living with water instead of against it. In 2012 she travelled to Bandung and Jakarta with her father, to see the city of his childhood and a coastline that was sinking.

As a supervisor she was demanding and kind in equal parts. She read every draft within forty-eight hours and once drove a doctoral candidate to hospital herself before returning to finish the seminar. She became associate professor in 2019. Colleagues remember her skates in the corner of her office, her habit of explaining difficult things with a coffee cup and a spoon, and the afternoon she built a dike out of cutlery to make a point to a visiting minister.

In 2013 she married Maarten van Gelder, whom she had met on a rowing trip, and they had Jip in 2017 and Sanne in 2020. She played field hockey on Sunday mornings, skated on natural ice on the few days a decade that the canals froze properly, and sang, badly and joyfully, in the shower and the car.

Annelies died on 12 November 2024 at home in Delft, after a short illness faced with the same honesty she brought to everything, with Maarten and the children beside her. She leaves Maarten, Jip, Sanne, her mother Truus, her brother Rob, and a great many people whose work and lives she made a little lighter.