Ahmed Khalifa

Started Fall 2023
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Ahmed Khalifa was born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt – the city AKA the Bride of the Mediterranean. He has been interested in earth surface processes since childhood and has pursued this interest through a B.S. and an M.S. in civil engineering at Alexandria University, Egypt and into a research career in coastal engineering. Ahmed’s dedicated work and understanding of the physics behind engineering practices gained him a research position among 24 candidates out of two thousands of his peer who applied for the National Water Research Center (NWRC), Egypt. Ahmed worked for 5 years at the Coastal Research Institute (CoRI) under the umbrella of the NWRC where he had the opportunity to assess – through research and consultancy – many coastal hazards and phenomena in many zones on the Nile delta such as erosion/deposition, shoreline change, storm surge, and coastal flooding. Ahmed longed to expand his understanding to larger spatial and temporal scales, so now, he is undertaking a PhD in Prof. Meselhe’s lab at the River-Coastal Science and Engineering Department, Tulane University.

Ahmed considers himself very lucky to be capable of pursuing a research career and working on two of the most engineered coastal deltas in the world – the Nile and the Mississippi. Ahmed is part of a team studying morphodynamic landscape evolution in the Mississippi River Delta. He is in the process of developing a computationally efficient biophysical model that consists of three components: (1) a three-layered 3D hydrodynamic model, (2) a 2D morphodynamic model, and (3) a recently developed marsh inundation framework. The applications of this new biophysical model include examine hundreds of environmental drivers’ permutations, climate change projections, and optimization of sediment diversion operations.

Osama Tarabih

           Started Fall 2025

Osama M. Tarabih, Ph.D. is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of River-Coastal Science and Engineering (RCSE) at Tulane University. He earned his Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of South Florida where he also served as a Postdoctoral Scholar focusing on optimizing watershed management and reservoir operations to improve water quality in Lake Okeechobee, Florida. His expertise spans surface water hydrology, watershed and reservoir modeling, water quality management, and ecological engineering, with extensive experience in Python-based modeling and decision-support tools for harmful algal bloom mitigation. At Tulane, Dr. Tarabih joined Dr. Ehab Meselhe’s research group to expand his knowledge into coastal modeling and to employ his expertise in coding and water quality to advance the group’s research goals. He has collaborated on multi-institutional, federally funded projects with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and has authored peer-reviewed publications in leading journals such as Environmental Modelling & Software, Ecological Engineering, and the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management.