Fransje van Oorschot obtained both her bachelor and master degrees in Civil Engineering at Delft University of Technology. During her master, she specialized in Water Management with the main focus on hydrology. In her MSc thesis she performed an exploratory research on the representation of the vegetation’s root zone in land surface models. After finishing her MSc degree, she continued this research as a PhD candidate in the Water Resources group at Delft University of Technology. She will partly conduct her PhD research in the framework of the CONFESS project. Within this project, her focus lies on developing a climate controlled, and thereby more realistic, representation of the vegetation’s root zone, which is expected to improve modeled land surface-atmosphere water and energy interactions.