DUNEX Student Spotlight: Jinshi Chen

DUNEX Student Spotlight: Jinshi Chen Born in Beijing, China, Jinshi Chen is currently living in Falmouth, MA, in his third year at the MIT-WHOI Joint Program majoring in Physical Oceanography. He is affiliated with the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) at MIT and Physical Oceanography at WHOI. Chen hopes to stay in academia and do related coastal research. He has been at the During Nearshore Event Experiment (DUNEX) at the Outerbanks of North Carolina since mid-August 2021 and is expected to stay until November 2021. He is working with his advisors, Dr. Britt Raubenheimer and Dr. Steve Elgar, along with Dr. Enrique Padilla, Dr. Drude Christensen, Levi Gorrell and Ciara Dooley. He is also working with Laura Szczyrba from Queens University and Margaret Owensby from ERDC. In his research experiment at DUNEX, he has helped deploy three current profilers along a cross-shore transect, recording velocity profiles at 1Hz as well as the pressure signal to understand the vertical structure of undertow related to breaking

waves. After recovering the sensors he will use the pressure data along with that recorded by an offshore AWAC maintained by FRF to study the wave transformation in the surfzone. He will run a RANS model driven with offshore waves to compare with the in-situ data, and to investigate parametrizations of the undertow profile. Chen credits Dr. Raubenheimer and Dr. Elgar for bringing him into coastal science. It was during college he got interested in oceanography in general, taking

some classes and doing some research on internal waves. It was when he worked with Drs. Raubenheimer and Elgar as a summer student fellow at WHOI, he got to study surfzone dynamics related to Hurricane Matthew. He stated, “I soon fell in love with this subject because I can see waves propagating on to the beach all the time, but I haven’t thought about the complicated science behind it. Therefore, I decided to pursue this path with them.” Chen was a trained physics student and did some numerical modeling for coastal wave evolution and he hopes that he can use his model to compare with various field measurement as well as other models in different scales. More importantly, he says, “I am here to study with other scientists and students trying to polish my skills on observation and knowledge on coastal dynamics in general.” It is not a surprise that Chen is an outdoors person and has garnered a love for watersports such as sailing, swimming, and kayaking on lakes or the sea. He also enjoys hiking, camping, and driving through forests, but when he is inside, he does enjoy exploring baking and cooking when he has free time. Chen’s advice to someone who is interested in coastal science is to study math and physics “and to go to the beach as much as you can! You will observe many interesting phenomena and fall in love with it.” He believes future generations should visit the beaches and experience the waves, sand, dunes, and all the surfzone dynamics and think of the ways they can help solve the many issues coastal communities face. In closing he says, “I believe that people in many professions can contribute to solving the problem.” For more about DUNEX, visit https://uscoastalresearch.org/dunex