Welcome to the website of Coastal Hazards And Solutions Engineering (CHASE) research group at Florida International University. Our team conducts interdisciplinary research on hydrodynamics of coastal hazards and their interactions with natural and built elements around the coast such as sediments, aquatic vegetation, and structures and infrastructure near the coastline. Our goal is to quantify the vulnerabilities of coastal infrastructure including buildings, bridges, and roadways to flooding in the present and future state of the climate and sea level and study the performance of nature-based (green) structure-based (gray) solutions to mitigate those vulnerabilities and increase the resilience of coastal communities.
Current interests include quantifying flood hazards in urban coastal communities, accounting for storm tide and rainfall-driven flooding, wave loads on near-coast buildings, and hydrodynamics of nature-based solutions. We use computational fluid dynamics at different scales, machine learning, and field observations in an integrated approach to study coastal hazards problems.
The research in our team has been sponsored by NSF, NOAA, NASA, DOT, state DOTs, local governments, NGOs, and private sector.