Kyung-Duk Seo, Professor Emeritus of SNU College of Engineering, won the Coastal Engineering Award  at the American Civil Society


▲ SNU Emeritus Professor Kyung-Duk Seo

 
Kyung-Duk Seo, Professor Emeritus of the SNU Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering is to receive the 2020 International Coastal Engineering Award.
 
This award was established as a personal donation by coastal engineers around the world in 1977 to publicize individuals or organizations that have contributed to the development of coastal engineering with outstanding leadership. The organization selects and awards one coastal engineering researcher every year from around the world and it can be said to be the Nobel Prize in the field of coastal engineering. To date, four people have been awarded from Japan, a powerhouse in coastal engineering in Asia, and within Korea the late Professor Choi Byeong-ho of Sungkyunkwan University won the award in 2014.
 
COPRI (Coasts, Ocean, Ports, and Rivers Institute) under the American Society of Civil Engineering (ASCE) is responsible for the recommendation, screening and selection process, and the final decision is made by the ASCE Executive Committee. The winner of an even year is awarded at the International Conference on Coastal Engineering (ICCE) held every two years, and the winner of an odd year is awarded at the ASCE National or Specialty Conference.
 
Professor Kyung-Duk Seo will be awarded the award at the ICCE in Sydney in 2022 as the ICCE, which was scheduled to be held in Sydney, Australia in 2020, was postponed to 2022 due to Corona 19. He is a world-renowned expert in the design of coastal and port structures, has published about 90 papers in SCI international journals and has written 5 book chapters in technical books. In 2014, the ICCE, held every two years, was invited to Korea for the first time in 64 years.
 
Recently, Professor Seo gave a keynote speech at the Coastal Structures 2019 conference in Hannover, Germany, on applying machine learning techniques, a field of artificial intelligence, to the design of coastal structures. During his 20 years at Seoul National University from 1997, he produced 38 masters and 10 doctors. In 2013, he won the Excellent Engineering Professor Award (research award) of SNU College of Engineering and the Songsan Civil Engineering Award (academic section) at the Korean Society of Civil Engineers in 2016.
 
The award was made possible by graduates of Professor Kyung-Duk Seo's lab discreetly writing and submitting letters of recommendation, and also by Tony Dalrymple of Johns Hopkins University and Hajime Mase of Kyoto University, a longtime friend of Professor Seo's master/doctoral adviser, who wrote letters of recommendation, leading to Professor Seo being surprised to receive his award notice.
 
Professor Kyung-Duk Seo, who retired in the summer of 2017 and was recently given a break while taking a break after the completion of the Paektu Mountain race, said, "If you look at the list of past winners of this award, they have left a big mark in the coastal engineering field, and I can't get rid of the shameful thought of whether I deserve this award. However, winning such an award twice in the 30 years after the founding of the Coastal Engineering Society in our country means that research in this field has progressed that much, and we hope that this trend will continue to follow."