Chris Blenkinsopp

Dr Chris Blenkinsopp is a Senior Lecturer in Civil Engineering Hydraulics in the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering at the University of Bath. His teaching and research interests lie in the field of Water Engineering; in particular, coastal processes, remote sensing and ocean waves.

Chris graduated with an MEng in Civil Engineering from the University of Nottingham in 2001 after which he worked in New Zealand and the UK as a coastal engineering consultant.

Chris completed a PhD examining air entrainment and energy dissipation in breaking waves at the University of Southampton, graduating in 2007.

Following his PhD, he took up a postdoctoral position at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Water Research Laboratory working on the field investigation of sediment transport in the swash zone of sand and gravel beaches.

Chris was appointed as an Associate Lecturer in Environmental Fluid Mechanics at UNSW in January 2009 and was awarded a Lectureship in July 2011. His teaching focuses on Water Engineering and includes hydraulics and coastal engineering.

Chris joined the University of Bath as a lecturer in July 2013.

Research

Dr Chris Blenkinsopp's primary research interests cover remote sensing of coastal processes, sediment transport and hydrodynamics in the surf and swash zone, wave breaking and wave energy converters.

Chris has considerable expertise in field and laboratory measurements of coastal processes and has been involved in several major field and prototype-scale laboratory experiments including the ECORS project in France and the EU-funded BARDEX 1 and 2 projects at the Delta Flume in the Netherlands.

Chris is currently lead investigator of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project which examines bed shear stress under run-up flows and involves field experiments in Australia and Europe, as well as laboratory testing at the world’s largest coastal engineering laboratory facility in Germany.

Chris is also heavily involved in developing LiDAR technology for the measurement of coastal hydrodynamics and the investigation of storm erosion and recovery of beaches.

Interested in supervising students studying:

• Remote sensing of coastal processes
• Coastal hydrodynamics
• Coastal sediment transport
• Wave breaking.