ASCE has honored Kyung Doug Suh, Ph.D., D.CE, with the 2020 International Coastal Engineering Award for his research and advances in wave theory and the design of coastal structures; his numerous contributions to academic publishing; and his stewardship of generations of coastal engineers.
For more than 40 years, Suh has conducted cutting-edge research on breakwaters and perforated walls of various types and their interaction with waves. He has worked on the mild-slope equation and its use for rapidly varying bottoms, modeling of shorelines, and wave damping by the bottom, nearshore currents. Most recently, Suh is leading the way in applying machine learning to the design of coastal structures.
While much of his work is of an academic nature, Suh has provided engineers with the tools to design structures better, with papers on safety factors, optimum stone weights, breakwater stability, etc. In addition, he has extended models that were developed for a single-wave train to a spectral form for realistic sea states, including considering increase of external sea forces due to global warming.
Suh is widely published in the international literature, as has served as editor for the Journal of the Korean Society of Coastal and Ocean Engineers, the Korean Society of Civil Engineers Journal of Civil Engineering, and the international journal Coastal Engineering. He has been an active participant in ASCE’s International Conferences on Coastal Engineering (ICCE) and chaired the Korean Local Organizing Committee for the very successful 34th meeting of the ICCE in Seoul, Korea.
Through his teaching and mentoring, Suh shepherded generations of coastal engineers into research and practice and participation in professional organizations like ASCE and KSCE.
The International Coastal Engineering Award is given to an individual who has made significant contributions to the advancement of coastal engineering in the form of engineering design, teaching, professional leadership, research, planning or a combination thereof.
