Zhifei Dong, Ph.D. 

President and Principal Scientist

Dr. Dong is an experienced Coastal Engineer (10 years), the first author of Coastal Engineering Resilience Index (CERI), award-winning ArcGIS geoprocessing expert, and geospatial data scientist with a demonstrated history of working in coastal engineering, ArcGIS geoprocessing tools development and geospatial analytics: beach nourishment, numerical modeling of tides, waves and sediment transport, inlet management, coastal resilience, restoration and adaptation, decision-support and analysis toolboxes development with ArcGIS Python programming, LiDAR data processing, and machine learning applications. Dr. Dong has broad experience in working with state and federal agencies such as USACE, EPA, FDEP, GOMA and CPRA. Skilled in ArcGIS, Delft3D, SWAN, SLOSH, USACE software (SBEACH, GENESIS, etc.), Fortran, Matlab, Python, R, machine learning, cloud computing and computer vision. Dr. Dong has strong engineering and software development background with a Ph.D. degree in Ocean Engineering from Center for Applied Coastal Research at University of Delaware and a M.S. degree in Information and Data Science from UC Berkeley.

Education

Ph.D. in Coastal Engineering

Institution: Center for Applied Coastal Research, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19711 

Dissertation: Wave-Current Interaction in Strongly Sheared Mean Flows

Advisor: James T. Kirby

M.S. in Information and Data Science 

Institution: School of Information, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720

Focus: machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, cloud computing

B.S. in Marine Science 

Institution: College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, Ocean University of China, Qingdao