Jennifer Irish
- Charles E. Via, Jr. Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering
- College of Engineering
Synopsis:
Dr. Irish is a professor of coastal engineering with expertise in storm surge dynamics, coastal hazard assessment, nature-based infrastructure for coastal hazard mitigation, and disaster resilience.
Description:
With half the world’s population living near the coast, coastal flooding (storms, tsunamis) has had devastating impacts in coastal communities. Through cascading impacts, extreme coastal floods also have the potential to weaken national and global economy and security. In the US alone, half of weather- related, economic damage is due to hurricanes (Smith & Katz 2013 Nat Hazards), mostly from coastal flooding. Future population growth and sea level rise will increase the coastal disaster threat, with the former increasing lives and infrastructure in harm’s way and the latter increasing the severity of the flood hazard.
This increasing threat gives rise to a host of interdisciplinary and dynamically linked socioeconomic and environmental problems directly impacting coastal resilience. Central to ensuring coastal disaster resilience is the advancement of adaptive planning and mitigation practices by creating comprehensive knowledge of the uncertainties in coastal hazard assessments, minimizing those uncertainties, and understanding how to use these uncertainties in managing the interdependent physical- environmental-socioeconomic system.
Dr. Irish’s research goal is to understand and predict variability in coastal hazards arising from hydrodynamic phenomena and their dynamic interaction with future environmental and anthropogenic change. Outcomes will lead to better assessment of future risk to human life and livelihood, critical infrastructure, and the environment—in turn leading to improved engineering, planning, and management strategies. These strategies ultimately will form a sound scientific basis for developing new policies to minimize future risk. Meeting this goal requires research on disciplinary topics in coastal hydrodynamics as well as the pursuit of integrated interdisciplinary methods.