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.