About

Hi, I’m Chris! I’m a coastal scientist and structural engineer currently living in Brisbane, Australia.

PhD

I recently finished my PhD at the University of New South Wales Water Research Laboratory in Sydney, Australia. My work focused on forecasting beach erosion during extreme storm events, like the one at Narrabeen-Collaroy beach in June 2016. The goal of the research was to develop an Early Warning System which can predict erosion of sandy beaches for an incoming storm. I was supervised by Dr Kristen Splinter, Prof. Ian Turner and Dr Mitch Harley.

Left: WRL open day meeting the next generation of engineers. Center: Dr. Kristen Splinter and I after AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco. Right: Gearing up for pre-storm survey of Narrabeen-Collaroy beach with Nash and Rai.

Left: WRL open day meeting the next generation of engineers. Center: Dr. Kristen Splinter and I after AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco. Right: Gearing up for pre-storm survey of Narrabeen-Collaroy beach with Nash and Rai.

Here are a bunch of things that my research touched on:

Remote sensing: Satellites give us unpredented coverage of our beaches. How can we use that data to help build models of beach erosion and predict what will happen in the future?
Runup and swash-zone processes: On SE Australian wave-dominated beaches, runup can contribute a significant amount of water elevation increase during storms. How can we better understand how runup affects what happens on the beach face?
Interpretable machine learning: We all know that machine learning techniques can give great predictions given the right data and are starting to be used more frequently in the coastal engineering space. But what can these techniques tell us about how and why what might be happening?