November e-Newsletter Community Guest Spotlight with Mark Wang
Posted Nov 11, 2024
Mark Wang, Ph.D. candidate, University of Texas at Austin
Advancing Flood Mapping by Leveraging CUAHSI Opportunities: A Graduate Researcher's Perspective
My engagement with CUAHSI and the National Water Center Innovators Program Summer Institute has provided invaluable opportunities that have influenced my personal development and research. I am a Ph.D. candidate specializing in compound flood prediction with a focus on terrain analysis-based techniques. I am grateful to my advisor, Paola Passalacqua, for introducing me to CUAHSI’s programs and supporting my participation in them.
As a 2022 Summer Institute Fellow, I had the opportunity to immerse myself in hands-on research focused on advancing water prediction. With my teammates Mohamed Abdelkader and Ankit Ghanghas, we developed a quick, GIS-based technique to combine flood depth in the riverine-coastal flood transition zone, resulting in compound flood depth. We were fortunate to have the guidance of our theme leads, Celso Ferreira and Kyle Mandli, along with support from CUAHSI, CIROH, the University of Alabama, and the NOAA National Water Center. Our work resulted in a technical report and influenced a subsequent publication on coastal flood mapping, as well as forthcoming studies. Beyond our research projects, perhaps the most valuable parts of the Summer Institute were the personal relationships we formed, which we hope to maintain throughout our careers.
In 2023, I was honored to return as a Summer Institute course coordinator with my 2022 cohort member Ebrahim Hamidi. In this role we helped plan the training curriculum, served as liaisons between CUAHSI and the 2023 fellows, and provided technical and personal support throughout the program. Serving as a course coordinator challenged me to improve my leadership and communication, offering learning experiences I could not have obtained elsewhere. It was also fulfilling to watch the 2023 fellows’ projects go from brainstorming sessions to polished final presentations.
Earlier this year, my labmate Matthew Preisser and I were awarded a 2024 Hydroinformatics Innovation Fellowship (HIF)from CUAHSI. This fellowship has enabled us to focus on developing an open-source compound flood mapping package: pygeoflood. This package, which is under active development, combines new and existing codes developed within our lab to extract channel networks and calculate fluvial, pluvial, and coastal inundation. By refactoring legacy code to simplify installation and dependencies, we hope to lower the barrier to entry and make pygeoflood accessible to both academics and non-experts.
CUAHSI provides unique opportunities for early-career researchers to improve their communication, leadership, and teamwork, in addition to fantastic technical and research support. I hope that my experiences with CUAHSI offer insight to any graduate students considering applying to their programs.