Cyber-enabled Discoveries for Sustainable Deltaic Coasts
CSRS Distinguished Professor Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Focus Area Head, Center for Computation & Technology Associate Director, Coastal Studies Institute Louisiana State University
Location: John R. Blocker Building - Room 104
Time: March 05, 2017 - 2:00-3:00pm
Abstract
Communities on modern river deltas with total populations greater than 500 million people face threats from global reductions in river sediment, land subsidence and rising sea level. Risk mitigation efforts may require intensive computer simulations that are integrated with data collection and engineering analytics for guidance. Funded by NSF, the Coastal Resilience Collaboratory (CRC) has a three-fold mission: 1) enhance the collaboration among earth scientists, computer scientists, cyberinfrastructure specialists and coastal engineers tasked with solving the sustainability issues of deltaic coasts; 2) identify risk mitigation for coastal communities subject to flooding hazards using approaches that integrate restoration and protection; and 3) leverage NSF investments in cyberinfrastructure to address problems of major national importance involving engineering design guided by coastal system responses to specific hazard mitigation projects. CRC is developing an integrated, coupled modeling framework built on top of a platform-transparent cloud technology tailored for the coastal modeling community. Its primary focus is to facilitate the deployment of complex models on HPC and cloud-like architectures with negligible performance overhead through use of low-level virtualization technology. The seminar will present the recent development at the CRC and demonstrate how computational and data sciences enable discoveries in coastal science and engineering.
Speaker's Bio
Dr. Q. Jim Chen is CSRS Distinguished Professor in Coastal Engineering and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Louisiana State University (LSU). He conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Delaware’s Center for Applied Coastal Research, and doctoral research at Old Dominion University and Danish Hydraulic Institute. Dr. Chen specializes in the development and application of numerical models for coastal dynamics, including ocean waves, coastal and estuarine circulation, wave-structure interactions and sediment transport. His research includes field experiments and application of remote sensing and high-performance computing technologies to solve engineering problems. Dr. Chen has secured over $13.3 million of federal research grants, and more than $1.2 million of research contracts from the state and industry as a PI and Co-PI. The federal grants include the NSF CAREER award and five NSF collaborative awards to support interdisciplinary research. He has authored and co-authored more than 99 manuscripts in technical journals, book chapters, and conference proceedings. Dr. Chen serves as an Associate Editor for two American Society of Civil Engineers journals and on the editorial board of an international journal. At LSU, he serves as Associate Director of the Coastal Studies Institute, and Head of Coast to Cosmo in the Center for Computation and Technology. He also serves on the LSU Council on Research and the Louisiana Water Resources Research Institute Advisory Board.