ASCE Central Jersey and COPRI Joint Lunch and learn Webinar

Tuesday, June 30th, 2026 - 12:00PM

Free Webinar worth 1 PDH!

Link will be available soon!

About the Presentation

Coastal communities are facing increasing flood risks due to sea-level rise, stronger coastal storms, and continued development in low-lying coastal areas. These challenges are creating growing demands for effective and cost-efficient flood mitigation strategies that improve community resilience while accounting for engineering, environmental, and economic considerations. This webinar will present a computational framework for designing, evaluating, and optimizing hybrid coastal protection systems that combine natural features, such as vegetation, with traditional gray infrastructure, such as seawalls. The framework integrates high-resolution hydrodynamic and wave modeling, flood-risk analysis, and engineering design optimization to quantify how different configurations of vegetation-fronted seawalls influence coastal flood hazards and community-level impacts. The presentation will demonstrate how these methods can be used to evaluate flood risk and mitigation benefits at the street scale for a coastal township along the New Jersey coast.

About the Presenter

Reza Marsooli is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Ocean Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. He received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Civil Engineering and holds a Ph.D. in Engineering Science with a concentration in computational hydro science and engineering. His research primarily focuses on the science, impacts, and mitigation of storm surges, waves, and sea level change under changing environmental conditions. He has authored and co-authored more than 50 peer-reviewed journal publications and is a recipient of an Early Career Research Fellowship from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.