Dr. Yan Ding earned a doctorate in hydraulic engineering from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, in 1994. Between 1995 and 1998, he worked in the civil engineering department at CHUO University, Tokyo, Japan, as a research associate and a teaching assistant. He then received his Doctor of Engineering degree in computational mechanics in 1999 from CHUO University. In 1998 he joined a civil engineering consultant company, INA Co., in Tokyo, Japan, and became a senior consulting engineer to lead a numerical simulation group to develop and apply numerical models to facilitate coastal structure designs and waterfront environmental assessment on sediment management, coastal erosion protection, pollutant transport, and water quality in rivers, coasts, and estuaries. In 2001, he joined NCCHE at the University of Mississippi to develop and apply numerical models for simulating coastal/estuarine/fluvial processes through modeling unsteady free-surface turbulent flows (including river/coast/ocean flows), sediment transport, as well as optimal flood and sediment transport control. He has developed and applied a state-of-the-art numerical model, CCHE2D-Coast, for modeling coastal/estuarine processes. He has also developed a coastal process model, CMS-Flow (implicit), for the SMS (Surfacewater Modeling System) application software package (Version 10.0) sponsored by the Inlet Modeling System Work Unit of the Coastal Inlets Research Program (CIRP), U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Engineering Research and Development Center (ERDC). Dr. Ding has also conducted various engineering application projects in the U.S. and abroad to solve real-world problems such as flooding/inundation prediction/mapping due to storm surge and hurricane waves, flood water control, shoreline erosion protection, coastal/estuarine structure planning/design, navigation channel infilling, sediment management, and environmental impact assessment of sea level rise.
