Workshop: Coastal Engineering Research Framework, Arlington, Virginia, November 12-13, 2018

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This grant provides funds to convene a 1.5 day Coastal Engineering Research Framework Workshop to be held November 13-14, 2018 at the Virginia Tech Executive Education Center in Arlington, Virginia. The Workshop objective is to solicit and synthesize directions for coastal engineering research and education in the United States over the next ten years and further into the future. There will be approximately 45 participants from academia, government, and industry. The organizers will take care to ensure that a wide cross-section of the coastal engineering community is represented. Additional outside experts will also be invited to stimulate cross-fertilization. The product of the Workshop will be a report with recommendations for future research directions both at NSF, and in the larger coastal engineering field.Coastal engineering requires many different toolsets ? beginning with climatological and weather studies (and sometimes seismic for tsunamis); encompassing parts of oceanography, marine geology, economics, sociology, planning, policy, and ecology; including many different aspects of structural loading and design and geotechnical engineering; and thoroughly intertwined with large scale infrastructure. Thus, there is no shortage of scientific challenges. While disciplines such as earthquake engineering have long had a reasonable understanding of hazard loading, this continues to be an important item on coastal engineering research agendas. Particularly in complex built or natural environments, prediction of many coastal engineering processes remains reliant on semi-empirical estimates based on idealized cases or historical records. Similarly, human interaction with the coastline as individual or community-wide planning and response to disasters, analysis of ecosystem benefits, or planning for long-term changes in coastal environments, requires expertise in many disparate disciplines. While parts of these issues are presently being addressed by a variety of agencies, there remains a wide opening for NSF to address both small-scale and large-scale coastal engineering research and educational needs and opportunities. The results from this Workshop will help to provide sustained direction for coastal engineering research and education, both at NSF and other agencies. Areas ripe for cross-fertilization with other disciplines will be identified. The Workshop will reserve at least 25% of spaces for early career professionals to ensure that they obtain experience into larger aspects of coastal engineering, and can meet more established researchers. Similarly, the PIs will ensure that women and underrepresented minorities form a critical mass for participation. This will be accomplished through direct targeting of specific people at all levels. The Workshop will also keep a few spaces open for those who hear about it and contact the organizers directly.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.