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Wes Lauer, PhD, PE
Chair and Professor
Biography
Dr. Lauer joined Seattle University after receiving his Ph.D. in Civil & Environmental Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2006. He also earned an M.Eng. in Civil Engineering at U.C. Berkeley and a B.S.E. in Civil Engineering at Walla Walla University and worked professionally as a civil engineer and hydrologist between 1998 and 2002 (intermittently thereafter).
Representative consulting projects have focused on flood management, geomorphic assessment of rivers, and numerical modeling of hydraulic, hydrologic and geomorphic processes. Dr. Lauer has worked on research and consulting projects in Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, Louisiana, North Carolina, as well as in Europe, Haiti, Jamaica, and Papua New Guinea. He is a registered Professional Engineer in the State of Washington.
Courses Taught
Dr. Lauer is a geomorphologist and engineer with over 15 years of experience in water resources engineering, geomorphology and sediment transport, numerical modeling, and geographic information systems (GIS). He is currently studying the hydraulic, geomorphic, and sediment transport implications of long-term changes in environmental conditions on river systems.
Recent projects have focused on measurements of decadal-scale changes in channel width in the Minnesota River basin, Minnesota, and on the development a sediment transport model called Morphodynamics and Sediment Tracers in 1-Dimension (MAST-1D) that simulates size-specific sediment transport and accounts for the movement of sediment particles between river channels and adjacent alluvial floodplain deposits.
Dr. Lauer wrote and periodically updates the River Planform Statistics Toolbox, an ArcGIS add-in that is part of the National Center for Earth Surface Dynamics stream restoration toolbox (http://www.nced.umn.edu/content/stream-restoration-toolbox).