Celebrating our students: Past, present and future
Dear Friends,
As we head into the new academic year, I am reflecting on one of the most rewarding parts of working with the Center for Coastal Solutions (CCS): the incredible energy, curiosity and drive that our students bring to our mission of supporting healthy and resilient coasts.
This summer, we proudly watched several of our student affiliates move on to the next chapters in their careers, and we couldn’t be happier for them. Congratulations to Nick Chin, now a postdoctoral researcher at the UF Water Institute; Allison Cauvin, who’s doing bioinformatics for the UF neurosurgery department; Yiyang Kang, who will work at Amazon as a software engineer; and Hyun Dong Kim, who is a new assistant professor at Old Dominion University. Their accomplishments are a reminder of how far hard work, good questions and a supportive community can take you.
And now, we’re excited to welcome a new group of students, from ecology, oceanography, coastal engineering, landscape architecture, and computer science, who are jumping into everything from sediment transport modeling to nature-based solutions and tracking water quality using machine learning. It’s one of the things that makes this center so dynamic: students aren’t just working on their piece of the puzzle, they’re learning how to work with others to put the puzzle together.
What strikes me about students in 2025 isn’t just their technical skill or their interdisciplinary thinking (though both are impressive). It’s their instinct for collaboration, their openness to asking big questions across boundaries, and their belief that the best science and solutions happen in teams, not silos. This year’s cohort is already showing strong camaraderie in everything from coordinating field logistics and social gatherings to generous peer support.
To all our new students: welcome. We’re glad you’re here. You’re joining a community that learns by doing, supports one another, and keeps one eye on the coastline and the other on what’s next.
Andrew H. Altieri
Interim Director
Center for Coastal Solutions