ASCE has honored Weiming Wu, Ph.D., F.ASCE, with the 2026 Hunter Rouse Hydraulic Engineering Award for outstanding contributions to hydraulic engineering and computation modeling of sediment transport in rivers, estuaries, and coastal waters. His work advanced our understanding of various applications including river channel morphology, earthen dam failures, and interaction of flow with vegetation.
Wu is a leading expert in the fields of computational hydraulics and sediment transport. Over a period of more than 30 years, he has developed a suite of 1D, 2D, and 3D computational tools for modeling free surface flow phenomena, sediment transport and morphodynamics, and aquatic ecology in rivers and coastal waters. Because these models can account for nonuniform and cohesive sediment and the effects of unsteady flow and vegetation, they have been used by academics and practicing engineers alike for solving a wide range of hydraulic engineering problems, including the evaluation of the risk associated with dam and levee breeching. These algorithms have been adopted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in some of their widely used and extensively tested models, like HEC RAS and the coastal modeling system, which have become industry standards. This usage shows the kind of performance and predictive power that Wu’s models have.
In addition to a large number of papers published in well-respected journals, Wu has written two very valuable books: Computational River Dynamics (2007) and Sediment Transport Dynamics (2024). The former provides an excellent introduction to computational methods for free-surface flows with deformable boundaries, while the latter book is an all-encompassing treatise of the fundamentals of river and coastal sediment transport. There is no doubt that through the development of computational models, scientific articles, and books, Wu has had broad national and international impact in the field of hydraulic engineering.
The Hunter Rouse Hydraulic Engineering Award is presented, upon recommendation of the Executive Committee of the Environmental & Water Resources Institute Hydraulics and Waterways Council, to a distinguished person who will deliver the Hunter Rouse Hydraulic Engineering Lecture at an appropriate meeting of the Society.
