Marcelo Garcia

Ph.D., Civil Engineering, University of Minnesota
M.S., Civil Engineering, University of Minnesota
Ing. Dipl., Water Resources, Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Argentina

Marcelo H. García holds a Ing. Dipl. (Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Argentina 1982) in water resources, M.S. (University of Minnesota 1985), and Ph.D. (University of Minnesota1989), both in civil engineering. He has been on the faculty of the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering since 1990, and has served as Director of the Ven Te Chow Hydrosystems Laboratory since 1997. Prior to joining UIUC, he was a Research Fellow for two years at St. Anthony Falls Hydraulic Laboratory, University of Minnesota. While in college, Dr. García participated in several model studies of the Parana River under the supervision of the Russian hydraulician, Dr. Gertrud Onipchenko.

Dr. García teaches undergraduate course on Water Resources Engineering and Hydraulic Engineering. At the graduate level he teaches Environmental Hydrodynamics, Sediment Transport, River Mechanics, and Open-Channel Hydraulics. He has taught courses on Hydrodynamics of Sediment Transport at the University of Genoa, Italy (1993), the California Institute of Technology (1997) and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Laussane, Switzerland (1999). He has also taught short courses in Argentina, Chile, Hong Kong, Mexico and Spain. Recently, he taught a week-long course on “Sediment Transport During Extreme Hydrologic Events” at the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha (Spain), and at the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba, Argentina.

Dr. Professor García is a leader in the field of river mechanics, sediment transport, sedimentation engineering and environmental hydraulics. He is best known for his research in sediment entrainment from riverbeds, flow and transport in vegetated channels, the mechanics of oceanic turbidity currents, and the dynamics of mudflows in mountain areas. His research has been funded at the Federal level by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. At the state level, Dr. García has received support from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR), the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRDGC), the Illinois Water Resources Center, the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant Program and the Sanitary District of Decatur, Illinois.

Related to water problems in the State of Illinois, Dr. García developed physical models of the Boneyard Creek, Urbana, to help in the solution of flooding problems. With the help of another large-scale model, he redesigned lowhead dams on the Fox River to reduce the number of drowning accidents, and designed canoe chutes for the same dams in order to increase the safe recreational use of Illinois Streams. He has also worked with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to mitigate navigation problems caused by sedimentation and vegetation in the Upper Mississippi River Basin as well as with the design of a bubble-plume aeration system for McCook Reservoir in Chicago, to be built for stormwater management at a cost of 400 million dollars.

The author of the book Hydrodinamica Ambiental (Environmental Hydrodynamics), García is widely published in scholarly journals and conference proceedings. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Sedimentation Engineering Manual 54 (Volume II) to be published by the American Society of Civil Engineers. He is the Chair of the Sedimentation Committee of the Environmental and Water Resources Institute (EWRI) and has served as Editor of the Journal of Hydraulic Research (IAHR) since 2001. He is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, International Association of Hydraulic Engineering and Research, International Water Resources Association, and American Geophysical Union.

Among his awards and honors, Dr. García has received the Excellence in Advising Award from the College of Engineering in 1997 and 2001. He was named an Arthur and Virginia Nauman Faculty Scholar in 1999 by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, a University Scholar for 2000-2003 and the first Chester and Helen Siess Professor of Civil Engineering in 2001. He has consistently appeared in the Daily Illini’s “Incomplete List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students.” He received the Karl Emil Hilgard Hydraulic Prize from ASCE for best publication in Journal of Hydraulic Engineering in 1996 and 1999, and the Walter L. Huber Research Prize for excellence in research from ASCE in 1998. In 2001, he received the 12th Arthur Thomas Ippen Award from the International Association of Hydraulic Engineering and Research (IAHR). In 2001, Professor García was named Honorary Professor by his Alma Mater, the Universidad Nacional del litoral, Santa Fé, Argentina.