Louise Slater has been working at the interface of fluvial geomorphology, hydroclimatology, and data science, with the rare capability of moving across these disciplines seamlessly. She is creative and innovative, and, despite being early in her career, she has been able to accomplish to a level much more on par with senior researchers. As part of her doctoral work, she focused on geomorphology and on the role of climate in driving the alluvial riverbed elevation response. She performed analyses to quantify how trends in both streamflow and channel capacity have affected flood frequency at gauging sites across the United States; her findings significantly contributed to our hydrologic understanding of the major drivers responsible for flooding. She complemented these efforts by focusing on attribution of changes in discharge during her postdoctoral work. Attribution represents a critical step toward improved flood adaptation and mitigation strategies, but one that has received limited attention in the hydrologic literature. Louise combined an extremely strong background in the fundamentals with an outstanding capability to process large data sets, allowing her to produce a series of studies that represent a benchmark for future hydrologic investigations. Her work as a faculty member at Loughborough University first, and currently the University of Oxford, has been equally impressive. She has been able to secure funding and collaborate widely to advance our understanding of flood nonstationarities viewed through the lenses of changes in the climate system, in land use/land cover, and in geomorphology. Her efforts span a number of different spatial and temporal scales, from urban watersheds in the United Kingdom to the global scale, and from the historical past to multidecadal future horizons. Louise is not only a fantastic researcher but also a great communicator, providing the big pictures while paying attention to the details. She has always known that science does not live only in papers, but it needs to be communicated well to be impactful, and she has paid much attention to this aspect. Moreover, she dedicates her time to service and educational activities through the organization of short courses and manuscripts of broad value to the community. Louise set a high bar for herself, one that she has been able to clear. I expect she will continue on this upward trajectory and that she will be an example for researchers in our field. —Gabriele Villarini, University of Iowa, Iowa City

I am deeply humbled and grateful to be receiving this award. I would like to thank Gabriele Villarini for his exceptionally kind citation and for being a true role model to me, as well as the other letter writers for their generous support. To date, my academic journey has been both a whirlwind and a vastly formative experience, blending diverse research fields, from fluvial geomorphology to hydroclimatology and seasonal to decadal forecasting. This sense of belonging to different research communities has somehow mirrored my upbringing across nations—appreciating and learning from diverse perspectives as I developed my own. This award provides a wonderful opportunity to express my gratitude to those who have mentored and supported me. Under the guidance of Hervé Piégay and then Michael Singer, as a graduate student I discovered the joy of exploratory research in large-sample fluvial geomorphology. A postdoctoral scholarship in Gabriele Villarini’s lab helped me broaden my horizons into hydroclimatology and hydrological forecasting. Back in the United Kingdom, I felt particularly supported by the kindness and wisdom of colleagues during my lectureship at Loughborough University, especially Robert Wilby. Since 2018, the University of Oxford and Hertford College have provided valuable support in enabling me to develop my research group. Michael Singer, my Ph.D. adviser, used to tell me that the sign of a good advisory relationship is when both parties learn from one another, and I feel lucky that this has been the case with every one of my group members. So I would like to say a special thank you to each of you, past and present. I feel fortunate to have collaborated with and/or learned from some outstanding people, both within Oxford and beyond, including Simon Dadson, Manuela Brunner, Stacey Archfield, Wouter Berghuijs, Conor Murphy, Anne Van Loon, Daniel Parsons, Steve Darby, Hannah Cloke, Xihui Gu, Jiabo Yin, Yao Yue, Chris Hackney, Ilaria Prosdocimi, Christel Prudhomme, Rebecca Lester, Tim Marjoribanks, Steve Rice, Heather Viles, Rebecca Hodge, James Kirchner, Chris Huntingford, Chiyuan Miao, Di Long, Shuo Wang, Abdou Khouakhi, and many more than I can list here. I am also deeply thankful to UK Research and Innovation for funding my Future Leaders Fellowship. Perhaps most important, I am grateful to my family: my parents, sister, husband, and daughter, who help me understand what matters in life, the value of striving for work-life balance and helping others achieve it too. —Louise J. Slater, University of Oxford, Oxford, U.K.