Dr. Jorge Abad named co-recipient of Wesley W. Horner Award from American Society of Civil Engineers

PITTSBURGH (January 23, 2012) … The American Society of Civil Engineers announced that Jorge D. Abad, Ph.D. is the co-recipient of the 2011 Wesley W. Horner Award, which recognizes papers that have contributed to the areas of hydrology, urban drainage, or sewerage. Dr. Abad is Assistant Professor of Water Resources Engineering in the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Dr. Abad and his University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign co-authors Marcelo H. Garcia., Ph.D., M.ASCE, Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Davide Motta, Graduate Research Assistant, published “Modeling Framework for Organic Sediment Resuspension and Oxygen Demand: Case of Bubbly Creek in Chicago” in the Journal of Environmental Engineering (September 2010). The study modeled combined sewer overflow events and their impact on dissolved oxygen levels in the short-term (hours or days) in Bubbly Creek.

The award will be presented at the World Environmental & Water Resources Congress in Albuquerque, New Mexico in May 2012.

Dr. Abad's research interests are combined by fundamental and applied topics. Fundamental topics include: mechanics of sediment transport, high-resolution description of hydrodynamic and morphodynamics in subaerial and submarine meandering channels, long-term prediction of river morphodynamics, development of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) models for environmental flows, environmental hydrodynamics, and transport and mixing processes. Applied topics include: river restoration, bank protection using instream-structures, development of GIS-tools for river management, development of CFD models for hydraulic structures (dropshafts and fish-passage canoe-chutes). Dr. Abad’s group seeks understanding of geophysical processes in laboratory-scale (theoretical, physical experiments and numerical approaches) and field-scale (theoretical, numerical and field work).

Dr. Abad is involved in international research and educational activities and is one founders of CREAR (Center for Research and Education of the Amazonian Rainforest, www.crearamazonia.org), and chair of the UNESCO-funded conference "Tropical Rivers 2012" (http://www.crearamazonia.org/tropicalrivers2012/index.html).

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