Meet the First Graduates of Tulane’s River-Coastal Science and Engineering PhD and On-Campus Master’s Programs

Laura Manuel '24, Emma House '25, and Sherif Ahmed '24 are applying Tulane’s river and coastal expertise to challenges ranging from Mississippi River forecasting and Louisiana land loss to environmental management and global water systems.

The challenges facing rivers, coastlines, wetlands, and water systems are becoming more urgent around the world.

Communities are navigating stronger storms, sea-level rise, land loss, saltwater intrusion, aging infrastructure, and increasingly complex environmental systems that do not fit neatly into traditional academic disciplines. Solving those challenges requires engineers and scientists who understand not only rivers or coastlines individually, but the ways they interact with ecosystems, communities, infrastructure, policy, and each other.

That vision sits at the heart of Tulane University’s River-Coastal Science and Engineering graduate programs within the Tulane School of Science and Engineering.

Built around the Mississippi River Delta and the rapidly changing Gulf Coast environment, the program brings together river engineering, coastal science, hydrodynamic modeling, restoration, resilience, and environmental systems in one of the world’s most active living laboratories for water research.

Now, the program’s first graduates are beginning to carry that experience into industry, government, and research institutions across the United States and beyond.

Among them are Laura Manuel, the first PhD graduate from Tulane’s River-Coastal Science and Engineering program, Sherif Ahmed, the first official on-campus master’s graduate from the program who is now continuing toward his PhD, and Emma House, whose work on river forecasting and flow behavior is already informing environmental management efforts beyond Louisiana.

Although each student pursued different research paths, their experiences reflect many of the same themes that now define the RCSE program itself: interdisciplinary collaboration, deep faculty mentorship, applied research, and a strong connection to the landscapes and communities of coastal Louisiana.

For Manuel, the journey began during the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic.

After graduating from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette with a degree in civil engineering, she was considering the next step in a career already centered around water systems and South Louisiana’s environmental challenges. At the same time, Tulane’s RCSE program was still in its earliest stages, with no graduates yet and only a small group of students beginning to shape what the program could become.

Still, Manuel saw something special in the faculty and the vision they were building.

“I wanted to go straight for a PhD,” Manuel said. “Dr. Meselhe had such a record in industry and academia, I was like, this is going to be a great move. I’m just going to go full force and do the whole dissertation track.”

Over the next four years, Manuel immersed herself in advanced numerical modeling of the lower Mississippi River and Gulf Coast systems, focusing on how freshwater diversions and river conditions influence coastal environments.

Her dissertation combined highly technical hydrodynamic forecasting with collaborative decision-making tools designed to support scientists, engineers, and coastal managers working on complex environmental challenges. One major component of her research involved building forecasting systems capable of modeling salinity, temperature, and hydrodynamic conditions throughout the Mississippi River Delta and Gulf region using real-time environmental data.

Those systems could eventually support improved forecasting for issues such as saltwater intrusion, commonly known in Louisiana as the “salt wedge,” where denser Gulf saltwater moves upriver beneath freshwater during periods of low river flow.

“That is when the ocean water, which is high in salinity concentration, starts to creep up the Mississippi River,” Manuel explained. “When the river flow decreases and is lower, the salt wedge can travel further inland.”

But beyond the technical modeling itself, Manuel said one of the defining aspects of her Tulane experience was being surrounded by faculty and professionals actively shaping the future of river and coastal engineering.

She described the founding RCSE faculty, including Ehab Meselhe, Mead Allison, and Barbara Kleiss, as “an all-star cast” whose decades of combined experience stretched across academia, federal agencies, restoration projects, and major infrastructure systems throughout the Gulf Coast.

“It cannot be overstated how much experience they brought to the table,” Manuel said. “They brought real-world experience. They brought the challenges that they faced.”

One moment in particular still stands out to her years later.

Manuel remembers sitting in the River Coastal Center listening as faculty members and agency leaders from organizations including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, ERDC, and USGS openly discussed some of the most difficult water management and restoration challenges facing Louisiana.

“They were having such candid conversations about serious challenges, but they also knew they had the ability to do something about them,” Manuel said. “For me, it was inspiring. Their goal was to pass all of that knowledge on to the next generation.”

Today, Manuel works as a water resource engineer for Stantec, where she applies the same combination of technical modeling, systems thinking, and stakeholder collaboration to large-scale infrastructure and resilience projects involving federal and state agencies.

Even after graduating, she has remained closely connected to the RCSE program, returning for symposiums and exploring opportunities to eventually teach future students as an adjunct instructor.

For House, the path into river and coastal science began hundreds of miles away from Louisiana.

Growing up in Rhode Island, she was surrounded by beaches and coastal communities, but she said it was not until she arrived in New Orleans that she fully understood the scale and urgency of the environmental challenges facing river and delta systems.

“In Rhode Island, we kind of take our natural resources for granted a little bit,” House said. “But in coastal Louisiana, land is disappearing at an alarming rate. You can actually see these challenges happening in real time.”

House first connected with Meselhe during a virtual research experience at the National Water Center in 2021, where she became interested in hydrodynamic modeling and river systems during the height of the pandemic.

Working remotely from her bedroom while collaborating with researchers and graduate students, she quickly realized she wanted to pursue a PhD focused on rivers and environmental systems.

She joined Tulane’s RCSE program in 2022 and completed her doctorate in 2025, focusing her research on “streamflow hysteresis,” a complex phenomenon that affects how river discharge is estimated during changing flood conditions.

Her work combined numerical modeling, hydraulic simulations, and sensitivity analysis to better understand how rivers behave during rising and falling flood stages and how those behaviors can improve forecasting accuracy.

“We found that free surface slope, which can be measured with just two water level sensors, is actually a really strong indicator,” House said.

Although the research itself was highly technical, House said one of the most meaningful parts of the experience was the personal growth that happened throughout the process.

“In the beginning, it was tough,” she said. “You think, ‘How am I going to do this? I’m going to need someone to tell me what to do every step of the way.’ But by the end, I was making decisions and taking ownership of the project. When I defended, I really felt like it was my work.”

That confidence, she said, developed through both mentorship and community.

House spoke enthusiastically about professors like Allison and David Biedenharn, whose classes blended technical expertise with decades of firsthand experience studying the Mississippi River, deltas, and coastal systems.

“Mead is an amazing storyteller,” House said. “My mind was blown multiple times during his class just hearing about his experiences and learning how these coastal and ocean systems evolve over time.”

Outside the classroom, House also became deeply involved in the RCSE graduate student community, helping organize events, networking activities, swamp tours, and field experiences that connected students across research disciplines.

“It’s easy in graduate school to become siloed and just focus on your project,” she said. “Having a strong community around you really mattered.”

Some of those experiences brought students directly into the wetlands and waterways they were studying, giving them opportunities to see restoration projects, marsh systems, and rapidly changing coastal environments firsthand.

For House, those moments reinforced something that became central to her Tulane experience: the importance of place-based learning.

“You’re doing the work where the work is happening,” she said. “You can drive an hour outside the city and see these systems up close.”

Today, House works for the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, where her responsibilities include shoreline and waterway management, dam inspections, environmental monitoring, and coastal fieldwork throughout the state.

For Ahmed, Tulane represented an entirely different kind of journey.

Originally from Egypt, Ahmed grew up studying and working around one of the world’s most historic river systems: the Nile River.

After earning his undergraduate degree in water and environmental engineering from Cairo University in 2014, he joined Egypt’s Hydraulics Research Institute, where he spent years working on river engineering, irrigation systems, and hydraulic modeling tied to the Nile River network.

“We used a lot of modeling on the Nile River and the irrigation network,” Ahmed said. “Most of my work was focused on river systems.”

At the same time, he was also completing a master’s degree in river engineering at Cairo University while searching internationally for opportunities to continue toward a PhD. That search eventually connected him with Meselhe through one of Meselhe’s former doctoral students, who had become Ahmed’s supervisor in Egypt.  

Ahmed arrived at Tulane in 2022, completed the program’s first official on-campus master’s degree in 2024, and is now continuing toward his PhD.

For him, one of the biggest attractions of the RCSE program was its ability to bridge both river and coastal science within a single interdisciplinary framework.

“The department here covers what I used to work on in Egypt, but it also includes coastal science and engineering,” Ahmed said. “That combination was very important to me.”

His current research focuses on sediment transport, vegetation dynamics, and land evolution throughout the Mississippi River Delta and Atchafalaya Basin, examining how sediment movement, vegetation health, tides, waves, and river systems contribute to either land loss or land creation across coastal Louisiana.

“We are trying to understand the sediment budget of the Atchafalaya Basin,” Ahmed explained. “How much sediment stays in the basin, how much reaches the Gulf, and how those processes affect land evolution.”

Coming from Egypt, Ahmed said one of the most eye-opening parts of his Tulane experience has been seeing the sheer scale of Louisiana’s coastal land loss and restoration challenges.

“In Egypt, we do have land loss in the delta, but nothing on the scale of coastal Louisiana,” he said. “The land loss here is massive.”

He also found himself adapting to entirely different engineering terminology, measurement systems, and environmental approaches while transitioning into research work in the United States.

But he said the program’s combination of technical depth and practical expertise helped accelerate that learning process.

“They are experts in both the science and the practical work,” Ahmed said. “They have decades of experience working with agencies and on real projects, and that saves students a lot of time.”

Ahmed believes the interdisciplinary structure of the program is one of its greatest strengths.

“In the real world, you might become either a river engineer or a coastal engineer,” he said. “But here you learn both.”

Together, the experiences of Manuel, House, and Ahmed illustrate how Tulane’s River-Coastal Science and Engineering programs are continuing to evolve into a globally connected hub for applied river and coastal research.

Their paths have taken them from Louisiana wetlands and Mississippi River forecasting systems to Delaware waterways and Nile River engineering, but all three point back to the same foundation: a program built around solving real-world environmental challenges through collaboration, science, engineering, and deeply place-based learning.

As climate change, sea-level rise, flooding, and environmental instability continue reshaping coastlines and river systems around the world, the need for engineers and scientists capable of working across disciplines has never been greater.

For Tulane’s first graduates from the River-Coastal Science and Engineering PhD and on-campus master’s programs, that future is already taking shape.