Marcelo Horacio Garcia

Marcelo H. García holds the M.T. Geoffrey Yeh Endowed Chair of Civil Engineering and serves as Director of the Ven Te Chow Hydrosystems Laboratory. He joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an assistant professor in January 1990, received tenure in 1996 and was promoted to professor in 2000. In 2001, he was invested as the first Chester and Helen Siess Endowed Professor of Civil Engineering and as an Honorary Professor at his alma mater, Universidad Nacional del Litoral (UNL). Dr. García teaches an undergraduate course on Water Resources Engineering and Engineering. At the graduate level he teaches Environmental Hydrodynamics, Sediment Transport, River Mechanics, and Open-Channel Hydraulics. His teaching has been recognized with his name appearing numerous times in the List of Professors Ranked as Excellent by Their Students. Dr. García is also the Founding Director of the Centro Internacional de Grandes Rios (CIEGRi) at UNL, Santa Fe, Argentina. He served as Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Hydraulic Research (IAHR) from 2001 to 2006. He was also Editor-in-Chief of the Manual of Engineering Practice 110 "Sedimentation Engineering," published by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) in 2008. In 2005, he was elected Corresponding Member of the National Academy of Engineering of Argentina. His honors and awards include: the Alvin G. Anderson Award from the University of Minnesota, the University Scholar Award from the University of Illinois, Honorary Member of Chi Epsilon Civil Engineering Society, the Karl Emil Hilgard Hydraulic Prize for best publication in Journal of Hydraulic Engineering (1996, 1999), the Walter Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize (1998), the Hans Albert Einstein Award (2006), the Wesley Horner Award (2012) and the Hunter Rouse Hydraulic Engineering Award, all from the American Society of Civil Engineers. Dr. Garcia was also recognized with the Arthur Thomas Ippen Award (2001) and the M. Selim Yalin Lifetime Achievement Award (2017), both from the International Association of Hydro-Environmental Engineering and Research (IAHR). He also received the IAGLR Chandler-Misener Award for most notable paper published in Journal of Great Lakes Research in 2011.The Panama Canal Authority recognized Dr. Garcia with the National Award for Scientific Contributions to Science and Technology from SENCYT, Government of Panama (2012). The International L.G. Straub Award for Best Ph.D. Thesis in Hydraulics and Water Resources Engineering has been awarded to four of his advisees: Dr. Yarko Nino (1995), Dr. Jeffrey Parsons (1998), Dr. Mariano Cantero (2007) and Dr. Jorge Abad (2008). Dr. García has supervised and supported the completion of 35 Ph.D. dissertations and 50 M.S. students. He has delivered the Distinguished Inaugural Lecture at Instituto Mexicano de Tecnologia del Agua, Cuernavaca, Mexico (2006), the Borland Distinguished Lecture in Hydraulics at Colorado State University (2008), the Enrico Marchi Distinguished Lecture, Italian Association of Hydraulics, Florence, Italy (2012), and the Donald Harleman Distinguished Lecture in Water Resources Engineering at Penn State University (2016). He has been an invited professor at the University of Genoa, Italy (1993), the California Institute of Technology (1997), the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland (1999) and the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Spain (2000). He was honored as a Distinguished Member of ASCE (2013) as well as Inaugural Fellow of ASCE's Environmental and Water Resources Institute (EWRI).Related to water problems in the State of Illinois, Dr. García has developed physical models of the Boneyard Creek, Urbana, to help in the solution of flooding problems. He re-designed low-head dams on the Chicago, Fox and Vermillion Rivers 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 Chicago River Control Structures, controlling the diversion of water from Lake Michigan in Chicago.  He also served in the expert review board for the US Army Corps of Engineers Fargo-Moorhead flood protection scheme. Since 2003, he has led a major effort to develop hydrologic and hydraulic models of the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan (TARP) being built the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRDGC). Together with his students he developed the first 3D hydrodynamic and water quality model of the Chicago River and associated waterways and unveiled the presence of density currents in the Chicago River during the winter months. Dr. García has also served as Co-Leader for the Sedimentation Studies Task Working Group for the St. Clair River, 2007-2010, International Great Lakes Commission (Canada-USA). He has also served in numerous international panels, including the Florence 2016 Scientific Committee to assess the hydrologic risk of flooding of Florence, Italy, the River Care Program in The Netherlands, and the Smart Water City Committee in Hong Kong. He has also served in expert review panels for the modeling of the Lower Mississippi River by the US Army Corps of Engineers and the State of Louisiana, as well as in an expert panel for "River Science at the US Geological Survey," National Research Council, The National Academies, Washington, D.C.