Tomás Cuevas López

Updated 2022/03/21

M.S. Student (Graduate Research Assistant)
Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering
North Carolina State University
Fitts-Woolard Hall, Room 3121
915 Partners Way
Raleigh, NC 27606
tacuevas@ncsu.edu

Hola! I’m a first-year Master’s student in the Coastal and Computational Hydraulics Team (CCHT) at NC State. I am from Chile, a country with a long history of natural disasters, and some of them related to the ocean. As a kid, I always wanted to study civil engineering. After the devastating 2010 tsunami that hit Chile, hydraulics engineering came into my mind.

I did my undergrad studies at the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences (FCFM) at the Universidad de Chile. During my bachelor’s, I only had one course related to coastal engineering, but after that course, I decided to do my last summer internship at PRDW where I had my first experience doing numerical modeling of coastal processes. Right after that, I started my thesis under the supervision of two PRDW engineers and a faculty professor. The goal of the work was to develop a series of python scripts to correlate and correct the results of wave hindcast models with satellite altimetry.

After my graduation, I joined the numerical modeling team of PRDW of the Chilean office, where I worked from July 2016 to December 2021. I was involved in a large range of coastal processes studies such as wave climate, wave agitation, sediment transport, hydrodynamics, moored vessel’s dynamics, CFD, etc. The other area where I developed some expertise is in Python programming, I started coding for my thesis and never stopped, I’m a data science enthusiast! My experience on this can be split into three main areas: (1) managing environmental datasets, like waves, wind, temperature, salinity, etc, (2) development of scripts and tools written in python related to coastal engineering, and (3) applying machine and deep learning models or techniques to subjects related to coastal engineering.

I am currently working on the DHS project “Improving the Efficiency of Wave and Surge Models via Adaptive Mesh Resolution.”

My main areas of interest are numerical modeling of coastal processes, applying machine learning (ML) in coastal processes to improve the time-performance and accuracy of the numerical modeling. I’m also interested in statistics and probabilistic methods since they allow handling the uncertainties of the models. And at last, in the combination of GIS tools with both ML and the outputs of coastal models, and in improving the communication of the numerical modeling results to allow better risk management and a resilient use of the coastal environment.

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Jenero Knowles

Updated 2021/08/03

Ph.D. Candidate (Graduate Research Assistant)
Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering
North Carolina State University
Fitts-Woolard Hall, Room 3121
915 Partners Way
Raleigh, NC 27606
jsknowle@ncsu.edu

Hey there! I am a first year Ph.D. candidate in the Coastal and Computational Hydraulics Team (CCHT) at NC State University. I was born and raised in The Bahamas, which is an archipelago of islands just southeast of Florida and north of the Greater Antilles in the Caribbean, a region prone to hurricanes. As I grew older, my curiosity cultivated as tropical storms produced severe flooding on the islands while structures such as seawalls and jetties were in place to protect the shorelines. This led to my undergraduate degree in civil engineering where I took courses in water resources and learned more about wave variations and their effects on its surrounding environments. Combining my interest of coastal waves and a desire to mitigate flooding from storms, I knew that delving into research would help me to discover solutions to some coastal engineering issues.

I will be working on a project, “A Comparative Assessment of Total Water Levels for coastal military facility readiness and resilience using numerical models ,” where I will use ADCIRC to investigate all the relevant physics that contribute to total water levels. The model produced from ADCIRC will be compared with other models prepared by a group of researchers from different institutions. As I continue to expand my knowledge, I look forward using and learning different modeling software used in the industry.

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Jessica Gorski

Updated 2021/07/29

I am a recent graduate of North Carolina State University, and I am excited to continue my education with the CCEE Department. As an undergraduate, I had the opportunity to participate in multiple research projects with the coastal engineering team. My first research experience was funded by the College of Engineering’s Women and Minority Summer Research Program. After completing the 10-week research project, I started an undergraduate research assistant position and was introduced to the morphological model eXtreme Beach (XBeach). Since then, the majority of my research experience has been focused on nearshore morphodynamics and erosional modeling. Previously, I assisted a project funded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers looking at the morphological response of a beach nourishment project located in Nags Head, North Carolina. As a research assistant, I helped in the development and training of a morphological emulator. Future work for this project includes incorporating climate change projections and investigating how these projections may impact the shoreline response.

I am working on a Department of Defense project, Forecasting Coastal Impacts from Tropical Cyclones along the US East and Gulf Coasts using the ADCIRC Prediction System, where I will be focusing on the sediment transport portion of the coastal impact forecasting. I am looking forward to using XBeach as a tool for erosional forecasting and collaborating with a larger team of researchers across the country.

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Johnathan Woodruff

Updated 2021/10/15

Ph.D. Candidate (Graduate Research Assistant)
Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering
North Carolina State University
Mann Hall, Room 424
2501 Stinson Drive
Raleigh, NC 27607
jlwoodr3@ncsu.edu

Ahoy! I am a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Coastal and Computational Hydraulics Team (CCHT) at NC State. Having been born and raised in Florida, I developed a love for the coastline and a passion for understanding and protecting it. During my undergraduate studies at the University of Florida, I took a few classes in coastal/water resources engineering and decided to pursue it further with a master’s degree at Georgia Tech. There I specialized in coastal and water resources engineering and found my passion.

At Georgia Tech, I took a particular interest in Coastal Hazards work which led me to the CCHT here at NC State. I am currently working on the NSF project “Subgrid-Scale Corrections to Increase the Accuracy and Efficiency of Storm Surge Models,” which aims to reduce computation times of storm surge forecasting while retaining the same level of accuracy used in high resolution models. So far, I have successfully incorporated sub-mesh corrections into ADCIRC. I hope to push these corrections further by implementing them in storm surge forecasting scenarios to drastically reduce computational run times. During my tenure at NC State I have participated in rapid storm surge gauge field deployments which has given me an appreciation for field data collected during storm events. This data gives validation to our model results and demonstrates that our models are providing accurate predictions. In addition, I would like to investigate the interaction between storm surge and rainfall events and its effects on both coastal and inland structures.

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