In Him (Ernie) Lee

Ernie Lee is a graduate student in civil and environmental engineering whose work uses drone and satellite remote sensing to quantify coastal salt marsh ecosystem services. Salt marshes provide coastal protection by dissipating wave energy and attenuating storm surge, yet sea level rise threatens their sustainability by outpacing marsh accretion. His research characterizes how marsh species and seasonal plant variations affect wave attenuation—essential for flood risk assessment and benefit-cost analysis of nature-based coastal defense. He develops 1D wave models in MATLAB to predict wave amplitude evolution accounting for bathymetry, wave breaking, and vegetation, employing 4th-order Runge-Kutta schemes for numerical stability. Image segmentation allows Ernie to extract plant frontal area from drone photography and process high-frequency pressure sensor data using RSKtools MATLAB Toolbox to validate field measurements. As a MathWorks Fellow, Ernie will expand image analysis to characterize marsh health. His work opens pathways for integrating computational design with ecological and hydrodynamics data to advance hybrid nature-based coastal defense.