Patrick Lynett

Department of Civil Engineering, University of Southern California

Patrick Lynett received three B.S., M.E. and Ph.D. degrees from Cornell University at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Immediately after completing his Ph.D. thesis, he started the position of Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at Texas A&M University. He is currently an Associate Professor and the “John and Dorothy Shea Early Career Chair” in Civil Engineering at University of Southern California.

His research interests are directed towards a better understanding of coastal processes, such as nearshore circulations, wave evolution from generation to the shoreline, multi-scale hydrodynamic interactions, and sediment transport. He combines numerical modeling with both controlled experiments and field observations. Short time-scale coastal hazards, such as hurricanes and tsunamis, are of particular interest.

Prof. Lynett was a member of the 2005 International Tsunami Survey Team to Sri Lanka, the 2005 Hurricane Katrina Coastal Impacts Survey Team sponsored by ASCE, the post-tsunami survey team in American Samoa in 2009, and numerous surveys throughout the Pacific after the 2011 Japan tsunami. He has been awarded research grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Texas Sea Grant Program, the Office of Naval Research, and private industry.

Since 2003, he has been a Primary Investigator (P.I.) or co-P.I. on research and equipment grants totaling US$8.2 million, including three large, collaborative NSF research grants of over $1 million each, of which he was the lead investigator in two. Notable awards include the Department of the Army Commander’s Award for Public Service given for Dr. Lynett’s post-Katrina work, and a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010.

Links

Sample publications

  • Lynett, P., Weiss, R., Renteria, W., De La Torre Morales, G., Son, S., Arcos, M., and MacInnes, B., “Coastal Impacts of the March 11th Tohoku, Japan Tsunami in the Galapagos Islands,” Pure and Applied Geophysics,doi: 10.1007/s00024-012-0568-3, 2012.
  • Lynett, P., Borrero, J, Weiss, R., Son, S., Greer, D., and Renteria, W. “Observations and Modeling of Tsunami-Induced Currents in Ports and Harbors,” Earth and Planetary Science Letters, v. 327/328, pp. 68-74, doi: 10.1016/j.epsl.2012.02.002, 2012.
  • Son, S., Lynett, P., and Kim, D.-H., “Nested and Multi-Physics Modeling of Tsunami Evolution from Generation to Inundation,” Ocean Modelling, v. 38 (1-2), p. 96-113, doi: 10.1016/j.ocemod.2011.02.007,2011.
  • Kim, D.-H. and Lynett, P., “Turbulent Mixing and Scalar Transport in Shallow and Wavy Flows,” Physics of Fluids, v. 23 (1), doi:10.1063/1.3531716, 2011.