UNF Taylor Engineering Research Institute Director Wins International Award

JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Nov. 13 -- The University of North Florida issued the following news release:

Dr. Don Resio, director of the Taylor Engineering Research Institute at the University of North Florida, received the 2013 International Coastal Engineering Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Resio, a Nocatee resident, recently received the award during the International Wave Hindcasting Conference in Banff, Canada, where he received a plaque and a $1,500 cash award. The International Coastal Engineering Award recognizes an individual who has made significant contributions to the advancement of coastal engineering in the form of engineering design, teaching, professional leadership, research or planning.

"Dr. Resio is a world leader in coastal engineering and science, and this prestigious award is another in a long list of outstanding accomplishments," said Dr. Mark Tumeo, dean of the UNF College of Computing, Engineering and Construction. "We are extremely proud that he is leading our efforts to establish a coastal and port engineering focus here at the University, and his success is indicative of the caliber of faculty we are so lucky to have in the College."

In 2011, Resio joined the UNF faculty as a professor of ocean engineering and as the director of the Taylor Engineering Research Institute. Prior to coming to UNF, he served as the senior technologist for coastal research within the Army Corps of Engineers for 17 years. For more than three decades, Resio has been a recognized leader in meteorological and oceanographic research, contributing significantly to improving the predictive state of the art for winds, waves, currents, surges and coastal evolution. His work has also produced more accurate methods for quantifying coastal hazards/risks and has helped establish a consistent physical framework for the inclusion of aleatory and epistemic uncertainty into planning and design estimates within the United States.

Resio has ongoing/funded research with numerous agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security on an intercomparison of the strengths and weaknesses of the three major methods of quantifying risk in coastal areas; the Office of Naval Research on developing new source terms for wind-wave prediction models; the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on specifying design wave and water levels for post-Fukoshima analyses of all existing nuclear power plants and for any new construction of such plants in the future; and with FEMA, through the Taylor Engineering Research Institute, for specifying statistical methods used in determining flood levels for FEMA insurance rates along the East Coast of Florida to name a few.

In addition to conducting research, Resio also teaches an undergraduate Honors course at UNF titled "Disasters: Causes, Consequences - Lessons Learned and Lost." He also mentors a high school student from Long Island who is in a national science competition and was impacted by both hurricanes Irene and Sandy.

He has earned numerous awards, including the 2013 Professor of the Year by the Florida Engineer Society'sNortheast Chapter, Engineering Research and Development Center Researcher of the Year, Army Corps of Engineers Researcher of the Year Award and Silver Order of the De Fleury Medal from the Army Engineer Association. Resio is a member of the <org>National Research Council Committee on Coastal Risk Reduction and serves as co-chair of the UN-WMO Coastal Inundation Forecast Demonstration Project.

UNF's Taylor Engineering Research Institute promotes collaboration among engineers and students in coastal and water resource engineering and draws upon the College's environmental computer modeling research. The Institute was created through a $1 million gift from Taylor Engineering, Inc. that the state increased to $1.5 million. The Institute is critical in a state where 77 percent of the population lives in coastal counties.

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