On any given day, the College of Engineering’s diverse and dedicated faculty, students and alumni produce significant research contributions through peer-reviewed journal articles, scholarly books and book chapters. Learn more about those contributions in this month’s Research Roundup. If you would like your work to be included in a future roundup, submit your research here.

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Stefan Talke

Civil and environmental engineering professor Stefan Talke and his colleagues recently published an article to be a highlight paper by the journal Ocean Science. The article, titled "Tide of the Time: Global Tidal Characteristics Observed from In-Situ Measurements" draws on >3500 high-frequency tide gauge observations to characterize tidal patterns around the world. The team found statistically significant trends in tidal amplitudes at more than half of the long-term tide gauge records analyzed, and showed that the duration that large spring tides stay within 20 cm of their peak varies from 1 to 14 hours around the world. The paper provides new insights into how tides vary spatially and are changing over long-time scales, thus supporting applications such as flood-risk assessment, natural resource management and navigation.

Additionally, Talke and his colleagues, led by Joris G.W. Beemster of Wageningen University, recently published the article "Coastal Flooding at Predictable Hours" in Nature Communications. The research shows that coastal flooding, often seen as sudden and unpredictable, can recur at consistent times of day in tide-dominated coastal systems. Using tide gauge records from the U.S. and U.K., the team found that floods cluster around specific hours, such as near noon and midnight in Boston. Along the California coast, elevated water levels and large wave runup coincide with winter-time king tides and are most likely to occur in the morning. Knowing the most-likely timing of coastal flooding offers new opportunities for emergency planning and risk communication.

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Daniel Hopkins

Industrial engineering student Daniel Hopkins and assistant professor Zhiyuan Wei recently published the article "Modeling Human Mobility Behaviors in Healthcare Access: Integrating Spatial and Social Dimensions" in Risk Analysis, the flagship journal of the Society for Risk Analysis. The research integrates large-scale mobile phone mobility data, pharmacy visitation records and demographic information to model healthcare access patterns in Los Angeles County. By combining data analytics with spatial and behavioral modeling, the study reveals that pharmacy utilization is driven not only by travel distance but also by the socioeconomic characteristics of neighborhoods. The next step is to incorporate these mobility-driven insights into optimization frameworks that support equitable and efficient healthcare system planning and service delivery. 

Zhiyuan Wei

Industrial and manufacturing engineering assistant professor Zhiyuan Wei has been awarded an NSF Engineering Research Initiation (ERI) grant for his project, "Optimizing Healthcare Accessibility by Integrating Human Mobility Behaviors into Facility Planning." The project aims to improve healthcare facility planning by incorporating how people travel to and use healthcare services, moving beyond traditional approaches that rely solely on geographic proximity. By integrating human mobility data, choice behavior and optimization models, this research will study how people choose and access care to design more effective, data-driven planning approaches. This project will also provide students with hands-on research experiences in data analytics, mathematical modeling and healthcare optimization.