LSU CEE Professor Receives $586,625 NSF Award to Advance Hurricane Resilience Research

LSU Civil and Environmental Engineering Assistant Professor Sabarethinam Kameshwar has received a $586,625 Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to advance understanding of how hurricane-induced building damage affects flooding and the forces acting on remaining coastal structures in urban shorelines.

Hurricanes are among the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history. The three most destructive hurricanes on record have collectively caused nearly $500 billion in damage, highlighting the urgent need for improved understanding of how storm surge and damage to the built environment interact to affect coastal communities.

Kameshwar’s CAREER project, titled “CAREER: Hurricane surge, wave, and debris-induced forces in non-stationary urban shorelines,” will establish a new research direction focused on how building damage during storm surge—referred to as non-stationarity in the built environment—influences overland flow and the forces acting on surrounding structures.

“Understanding how damage to one structure changes the conditions experienced by neighboring structures is essential for improving the way we assess hurricane risk,” Kameshwar said. “This research will help us move beyond simplified assumptions and develop a more realistic picture of how coastal communities respond to extreme storm events.”

The research will combine large-scale physical experiments with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations to model realistic urban shorelines in which buildings can fail at specific loads. The experimental component will be conducted at the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory at Oregon State University using a 1:20-scale model of an urban coastal environment.

A key innovation will be the use of breakable model buildings assembled with electromagnets to simulate building failure during storm events. Researchers will be able to control when individual structures fail and capture how progressive damage changes overland flow, hydrodynamic forces and debris-induced forces on buildings that remain standing.

The experiments will be complemented by a novel sequential CFD framework capable of simulating changes in the built environment as buildings fail. The computational approach will allow researchers to examine a broader range of urban configurations and hazard conditions and provide additional data for generalizing experimental findings.

The project will introduce new parameters to characterize realistic coastal urban layouts and systematically quantify differences in hydrodynamics and building forces between regular and irregular building configurations. The research will also investigate whether debris damming—an effect often emphasized in tsunami research—is a significant contributor to structural loading during hurricane-driven storm surge events or has been overestimated in some applications.

Researchers will further examine how limited debris-entrainment distances in realistic urban layouts affect the probability and magnitude of debris impacts, challenging simplified assumptions used in previous studies.

Using Kriging-based parameterization and uncertainty modeling, the research will generalize experimental and computational results across different urban configurations and hazard intensities. The analysis will quantify how aleatory and epistemic uncertainties affect the predictability of flow and structural forces and determine whether uncertainty obscures underlying trends important for engineering design and coastal risk assessment.

Experimental data, CFD results and the project's digital wave basin model will be shared with the research community through DesignSafe-CI, enabling researchers to benchmark future models and advance understanding of interactions between coastal overland flow and the built environment.

The findings are expected to inform future design standards and improve infrastructure safety while reducing reliance on overly conservative assumptions.

“By providing more realistic estimates of building forces and uncertainty, the research could improve hurricane-damage simulations and support coastal resilience planning by agencies including FEMA, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority,” Kameshwar said.

The project will also provide opportunities to translate research findings into engineering practice through Kameshwar’s involvement with the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), including its ASCE 7 subcommittees, as well as the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) community.

Preparing the Next Generation of Natural Hazards Engineers

In addition to advancing engineering research, the project will integrate research, education and workforce development to strengthen the natural hazards engineering pipeline.

Educational activities will include the development and delivery of a new undergraduate course focused on coastal hazards and loads. Research modules will also be adapted for community college curricula to engage non-traditional students and provide pathways into natural hazards engineering.

The project will host annual workshops for middle and high school teachers, allowing educators to co-develop classroom activities that introduce students to natural hazards engineering and the challenges engineers face in protecting communities from hurricanes and other coastal hazards.

LSU outreach programs will provide additional opportunities for middle and high school students to gain early exposure to natural hazards engineering, with graduate students serving as mentors. These efforts are designed to help address the growing need for engineers trained to understand and mitigate natural hazards as coastal communities face increasingly severe risks.

“All of these activities are designed to connect fundamental research with education and practice,” Kameshwar said. “By engaging students at multiple stages of the STEM pipeline and sharing research findings broadly, we can help prepare the next generation of engineers to address increasingly complex coastal hazards.”

The project’s research findings and educational materials will be disseminated through DesignSafe-CI, while Kameshwar’s continued involvement with professional and research organizations will help extend the project's impact beyond the duration of the award.

By integrating cutting-edge physical and computational research with education, outreach and engineering practice, Kameshwar’s NSF CAREER project will advance scientific understanding of hurricane impacts while helping develop the tools, standards and workforce needed to build safer, more resilient coastal communities.