Joannes Westerink, Joseph and Nona Ahearn Professor in Computational Science and Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences (CEEES) at the University of Notre Dame, and Richard Luettich, Jr., Distinguished Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have been selected by the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Coasts, Oceans, Ports and Rivers Institute (ASCE/COPRI) to receive the 2025 International Coastal Engineering Award.
The award, which represents the highest recognition in the specialty of coastal engineering worldwide, honors the two engineers for their “national leadership in coastal storm hazards and the development and maintenance of [their computer system] ADCIRC for surge and tidal modeling.”
The awardees, who were classmates in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s doctoral program in civil engineering, started collaborating post-graduation on a computer program that predicts hurricane storm surge and tides in coastal zones—a program now called Advanced Circulation Model, or ADCIRC.
Over the years, ADCIRC has evolved into a set of computer programs that accurately simulate in both 2D and 3D movement of coastal ocean water driven by tides, storm surges, wind waves, the global heat engine, and river flows, with flexible, detailed maps.
ADCIRC users include the Army Corps of Engineers, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (including the National Weather Service), the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Coast Guard.
ADCIRC has been used to design post-Hurricane Katrina levee heights and alignments in New Orleans and is used to develop FEMA Flood Insurance maps along the U.S. East coast, Gulf Coast, and Great Lakes coasts. Since 2021, ADCIRC has been used by NOAA to forecast water levels globally including those forced by hurricanes.
Westerink is the founder and lead researcher at Notre Dame’s Computational Hydraulics Laboratory (CHL), which develops computer codes and modeling methodologies to simulate the hydrodynamics of the coastal ocean and the adjacent estuarine, riverine, and floodplain systems.
He holds concurrent appointments in the Departments of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering and Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics and has received the University’s Faculty Award (2014); Joyce Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (2010); and the College of Engineering’s Outstanding Teacher Award (2004).
For his work in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, he received the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force Leadership Award (2007); Department of the Army, Outstanding Civilian Service Medal (2007); American Society of Civil Engineers Orville T. Magoon Sustainable Coasts Award (2014). Recently he received the American Meteorological Society, Scientific and Technological Activities Commission, Technological Accomplishments Award (2025).
Westerink also co-leads a CEEES junior class field trip each year to New York, New Orleans, or Texas to immerse undergraduates in the most significant infrastructure design and construction efforts in the United States.
The award to Westerink and Luettich will be presented at the ASCE/COPRI sponsored 39th International Conference on Coastal Engineering to be held in Galveston, Texas in May 2026.
Read more: List of previous International Coastal Engineering Award winners
—Mary Hendriksen