Professional Background:

Rick Luettich received his undergraduate and Masters degrees in Civil Engineering from Georgia Tech and his ScD in Civil Engineering from MIT.  He is a Professor of Marine Sciences and Environmental Sciences and Engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and he also serves as the Director of UNC’s Institute of Marine Science, a facility comprised of approximately 75 residential faculty, staff and students located on the coast in Morehead City, North Carolina.  His research focuses on modeling and observational studies of physical processes in coastal systems.  His modeling has emphasized the development and application of unstructured grid numerical methods that are optimized for geometrically complex systems such as sounds, estuaries and tidal inlets.  He has been one of the two principal developers of the ADCIRC coastal circulation and storm surge model and has overseen applications that have ranged from hindcasts and forecasts of tidal circulation and storm surge/inundation along the US coast to interdisciplinary studies such as physically mediated migration and larval dispersal.  ADCIRC is approved for storm surge studies by FEMA and has been a corner stone of recent US Army Corps of Engineers and FEMA efforts that include forensic studies in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, planning new hurricane protection systems for the Northern Gulf coast and evaluating 100 year inundation levels in coastal areas of the US.  Luettich is presently serving on two National Academy/National Research Council review committees – one reviewing the IPET studies by the Army Corps into the factors that led to the catastrophic damage to New Orleans by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the second reviewing the Army Corps’ LACPR program which is evaluating options for a new hurricane protection system for Southern Louisiana.  He is also serving as a technical advisor to the State of Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.  Luettich’s observational studies have included moored and shipboard sampling to characterize physical processes in coastal systems and have often been oriented toward understanding the role of physical processes in areas of water quality (e.g., phytoplankton blooms, dissolved oxygen depletion) and fisheries recruitment. He has actively contributed to the national Integrated Coastal Ocean Observing Systems (IOOS) programs and is presently collaborating on several real time observing and modeling systems in coastal North Carolina.