I am a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Iowa and a research engineer at IIHR—Hydroscience & Engineering. My main research interests are in the general areas of large-scale numerical simulations and turbulence modeling and applications in environmental hydraulics and river engineering. My Iowa Flood Center research efforts focus on the numerical simulation of floods in watersheds using 1D Saint-Venant solvers and on numerical simulations of flood propagation in natural environments using fully non-hydrostatic 3D RANS models with deformable free surface capabilities. We use these simulations to assess the performance of common numerical 1D and 2D shallow flow solvers employed by the Iowa Flood Center and to propose better ways to calibrate these lower-order models for flood prediction.The development of a 3D flood simulation capability will help improve the IFC's flood monitoring and flood prediction efforts and should eventually allow the development of more accurate FEMA flood maps.

Research interests:

• Computational fluid dynamics
• River mechanics
• Turbulence
• Hydraulics