Join the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences for its Spring 2024 Challenges and Innovation Seminar Series, featuring Elizabeth Holzenthal '15, Research Civil Engineer, U.S. Army Corp of Engineers Research and Development Center, Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory.

Abstract

More than 40% of the population of the United States lives in a coastal county, despite occupying only 10% of the nation’s land mass (coast.noaa.gov). Additionally, coastal recreation, fisheries, shipping, and other industries generate $9.5T annually. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is tasked with developing innovative and sustainable strategies to protect coastal communities, ecosystems, and their many services from climate change impacts.

This talk will provide an overview of active research conducted by the USACE Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) Coastal and Hydraulic Laboratory (CHL) to support project-level decisions across the nation’s waterways. Two case studies will be presented demonstrating CHL research in navigation and flood risk management mission spaces. In the first, an estuarine scale numerical model is used to quantify how various channel dredging and deepening activities can impact water quality and sediment transport pathways. In the second focusing on coastal beach hazards, the tradeoffs in computational accuracy and speed of various numerical models are discussed.

Dr. Elizabeth Holzenthal is a research civil engineer at the USACE Engineer Research Center (ERDC) Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory (CHL) in Vicksburg, MS. At CHL, she works on the development of hydrodynamic models of coastal estuaries, inlets, and beaches, with a particular focus on processes that drive sediment transport. She earned her doctoral degree in civil engineering at Oregon State University in where she conducted research on eco-hydrodynamic feedback between waves, currents, and submerged aquatic vegetation in laboratory and numerical studies. Dr. Holzenthal is a graduate of the ND CEEES program (class of 2015) with a B.S. in civil engineering with an environmental concentration.