Lab Members. |
Lab Director.
Dr. Thomas Wahl
Dr. Wahl is an Associate Professor at the University of Central Florida (UCF). He is affiliated with the Civil, Environmental, and Construction Engineering Department and National Center for Integrated Coastal Research (UCF Coastal) and he is also a core member of the Sustainable Coastal Systems Cluster. He obtained a Diploma (UNI) in 2007 and PhD (Dr.-Ing.) in 2012 in Civil Engineering at the University of Siegen in Germany. After a short postdoc with the interdisciplinary research center “Shaping the Future” at the University of Siegen he took a postdoc position at the College of Marine Science at the University of South Florida, supported by a fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Prior to coming to UCF, he was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow of the European Union in Engineering and the Environment at the University of Southampton, UK. CV | Email | ResearchGate | Google Scholar | Twitter | LinkedIn |
Faculty Researchers.
Robert Jane
Robert is currently a Research Assistant Professor at the Coastal Risk and Engineering (CoRE) Lab, University of Central Florida. He joined the CoRE Lab in January 2019 as a Postdoctoral Researcher. His main research interests center around utilizing statistical approaches to improve understanding and ability to make predictions regarding environmental phenomena aiding more effective water resource management. He has most recently developed a framework for the South Florida Water Management District that uses multivariate statistical models to capture the joint distribution of the principal drivers of compound flooding in South Florida. Prior to joining the UCF, Robert graduated from the University of Plymouth (UK) with a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Statistics (2013). He subsequently undertook a PhD in Civil Engineering (2018) at the same institution and in collaboration with HR Wallingford, which saw him develop multivariate fragility representation for coastal flood defense assets. Email | ResearchGate | Google Scholar |
Postdoctoral Researchers.
Meghana Nagaraj
Meghana joined the CoRE Lab in Spring 2023 as a Postdoctoral Researcher. She has a bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering from Visvesvaraya Technological University (India) and a master in water resources engineering from University Visveswaraya College of Engineering (India). Her PhD in Hydraulics and Water Resources Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Madras (India) focused on non-stationary modeling of extreme precipitation under the influence of large-scale teleconnections. At CoRE Lab, she is working on data-driven reconstruction of storm surge using statistical and machine learning algorithms to support a wide range of global climate-resilience efforts. Her research mainly focuses on assessing extreme weather events under changing climate and variability, includes modeling non-stationarity, causality, regional frequency analysis, and statistical downscaling. Email | Google Scholar | LinkedIn |
Sara Santamaria-Aguilar
Sara joined the CoRE Lab in Summer 2022 as a Postdoctoral Researcher. She has a degree in Oceanography from the University of Vigo (Spain; 2010) and a Master in Integrated Coastal Zone Management from the University of Cantabria (Spain, 2012). She completed her PhD at the University of Kiel (Germany; 2021), in which she assessed trends and variabilities of extreme water levels. Specifically, she analyzed the temporal and spatial variability of storm tide hydrographs, long-term trend in tides, and dependency of extreme skew surges and tides. After that, Sara continued at the same institution as a postdoc assessing coastal flooding for South Africa as a part of the BMBF (German Ministry of Education and Research) funded project CASISAC (“Changes in the Agulhas System and its Impacts on Southern African Coasts”). At CoRE Lab, her research focuses on modeling compound flooding from different combinations of drivers to support decision-makers in developing flexible climate adaptation strategies. Email | ResearchGate | Google Scholar | Twitter |
Joao Morim
Joao joined the CoRE Lab in Spring 2022 as a Postdoctoral Researcher. He is affiliated with the Civil, Environmental and Construction Engineering Department and National Center for Integrated Coastal Research (UCF Coastal) at University of Central Florida (UCF). His research focus on historical and future climate resilience of ocean and coastal regions based on climate risk analysis. His core work focus on understanding historical and future changes in extreme storms, ocean waves, storm surges and sea level rise to support broad-scale coastal adaptation planning, using observational data (satellite and in-situ measurements), model simulations (reanalysis or hindcasts) and climate models. His research also addresses the underlying uncertainties surrounding the drivers of ocean and coastal hazards to prevent costly maladaptation practices. Before joining the UCF, he had been affiliated with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) under the National Environmental Science Program (NESP) Climate Change System Hub (ESCC). He has also closely collaborated with multiple private and governmental international organizations, including NASA, the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Environment Canada (EC), Berkeley National Laboratory as well as Kyoto’s Disaster Prevention Center (KDPC) and the National Oceanographic Centre (NOC). Email | ResearchGate | Google Scholar | Twitter | LinkedIn |
Alejandra Rodriguez Enriquez
Alejandra’s main research interest is linked to coastal risks from a physical and socio-economic perspective. After obtaining her PhD in Physical Oceanography at the University of the Balearic Islands, she joined the Coastal Risks and Engineering Lab at UCF in January 2020. She has a degree in Marine Sciences (2013), University of Vigo (Spain) and a Master in Coastal and Harbor Engineering (2015), University of Cantabria (Spain). Her PhD focused on the assessment of the coastal impacts of waves and future sea-level rise, as well as the socio-economic consequences of these climate-induced environmental changes. Currently, she is studying the spatial characteristics and variability of extreme storm surges on a global scale. Email | ResearchGate | Google Scholar | LinkedIn |
Graduate Students.
Siddiqur Rahman
Siddiqur joined the CoRE Lab in Fall 2023 as a PhD student in Civil Engineering at UCF. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Disaster Management from Begum Rokeya University Rangpur (Bangladesh) and a Master’s degree in Geography from the University of Alabama with a concentration in GIS. His Master’s thesis focused on changes and variabilities of extreme precipitation events in the Southeastern United States. Before joining the CoRE Lab, Siddiqur worked as a graduate research assistant in the GIS lab at the University of Alabama. At the CoRE lab, he is involved in a DoE-funded project to develop Weather-Outage modeling for Florida, where he will be using statistical models, machine learning, and GIS to explore the impacts of extreme weather and climatic events on power outages, and engage in exploratory model development to predict power outages. His research interests include, but are not limited to, extreme precipitation, analyzing and modeling extreme events, and the impacts of hydro-climatological extremes on the environment and society. Email | LinkedIn | Google Scholar |
Ariadna Martin Oliva
Ariadna joined the CoRE Lab in Fall 2022 as a PhD Student in Civil Engineering at UCF. She holds a Bachelor's Degree in Physics and a Master's Degree in Advanced Physics and Applied Mathematics (Specialization in Geophysical Fluids) from the University of Balearic Islands (Spain). During her undergraduate studies, she worked at the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies (IMEDEA) researching the effect of extreme whether on coastlines, in terms of wind-waves and storm surges. As part of her PhD, in the CoRE Lab, she is investigating the spatial and temporal clustering of storm surges globally and how these clusters modulate coastal impacts; this work is supported by a NSF CAREER grant. Email | Twitter | LinkedIn | ResearchGate | Google Scholar |
Pravin Maduwantha
Pravin joined the CoRE Lab in Fall 2022 as a PhD student in Civil Engineering at UCF. He graduated from the University of Moratuwa (Sri Lanka) with a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering and a Master’s degree in Civil Engineering (Major Component: Coastal Engineering Research). Before joining the UCF, he has been a graduate researcher in the University of Moratwua studying on Wave Energy Resource Characterization for Sri Lanka. At the CoRE Lab, he is involved in the MACH project and working on developing and applying data-driven and statistical methods to analyze compound flooding in coastal areas caused by the combination of storm surge, wave impacts, rainfall, and high river discharge. His research interests are Nearshore Hydrodynamics, Sediment Transport and Coastal Hydrodynamic Modeling. Email | Google Scholar | Twitter | LinkedIn | ResearchGate |
Javed Ali
Javed joined the CoRE Lab in Fall 2020 as a PhD Student in Civil Engineering at UCF. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Agricultural Engineering (Specialization in Water Resources Engineering) from G.B. Pant University of Agriculture & Technology (India) and an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s degree in Water Science & Engineering (Specialization in Flood Risk Management) from UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education (Netherlands) and TU Dresden (Germany). Before joining the UCF, he has been a MOPGA Researcher at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France. At the CoRE lab, he is working on NAS funded project "The New First Line of Defense: Building Community Resilience through Residential Risk Disclosure" for analyzing multi-hazard risks and impacts of compound extreme events and their spatio-temporal interrelationships. Some of his research interests include multi hazards risk assessment, analyzing compound weather/climate extremes and their spatial and temporal interactions, modeling impacts of natural hazards and studying hydrometeorological extreme events using machine learning and statistical methods. Email | Website | Google Scholar | Twitter | LinkedIn |
Amanda Barroso
Amanda joined the CoRE Lab in Fall 2020. She received the McNair Doctoral Fellowship for pursuing a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering (Water Resources) at UCF. Amanda has finished her B.S. degree in Geosciences (Atmospheric Science track) at Florida International University in Spring 2020. During her undergraduate studies, she was researching climate drivers of sea-level rise in the South Florida region. She is passionate about exploring extreme weather events and the intersection of climate change, risk and vulnerability. At the CoRE Lab, Amanda is involved with the NASA Sea Level Science team. Her research focus is to assess climate data and link it to flooding projections across the US. Additionally, she will continue analyzing air-sea interactions that can serve as mechanisms for climate variability that influence coasts. Email | LinkedIn | ResearchGate |
Ahmed Nasr
Ahmed joined the CoRE Lab in Fall 2019 as a PhD student in Civil (Water Resources) Engineering at UCF. Ahmed’s Research is focused on understanding compound flooding from multiple drivers (pluvial, fluvial, and oceanographic) using multivariate statistical methods through a joint NSF-NERC funded project. His research interests include the application and combination of statistics, machine learning, and numerical methods to tackle problems in water resources. Ahmed graduated from Cairo University (Egypt) with a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering and a master’s degree in Irrigation and Hydraulics Engineering. Later, he obtained another master’s degree in Water Science and Engineering with specialization in Flood Risk Management. Previously, Ahmed worked as intern engineer at Nile Basin Initiative (Ethiopia), assistant lecturer at Cairo University, and flood risk specialist (MENA and Central Asia). Email | Google Scholar | Twitter | LinkedIn | ResearchGate |
Undergraduate Research Assistants.
Former Lab Members.
Michael Tadesse
(PhD., 2018-22) Cristina Lacal
(URA, 2022-23) |
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All Rights Reserved.
Website developed and maintained by Javed Ali.