Tracy Mandel, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
UNH Mechanical Engineering and Ocean Engineering
Friday, October 31, 2025, 3:10pm
Chase 105
Abstract
Coastal vegetation such as seagrasses and marsh plants provide a range of ecosystem services to coastal communities, including wave dissipation, sediment stabilization, and even neutralization of human pathogens. The health and role of these ecosystems are important to characterize, but they are often biophysically complex. In this talk, I will cover three important problems in vegetative coastal ecosystems and how we study these problems using laboratory, field, and numerical approaches, including: (1) the role of plant motion on within-canopy shading and light availability in seagrass meadows; (2) sediment transport and accretion in low-energy estuarine salt marsh environments; and (3) the transmission of marine disease in benthic environments.
Bio
Tracy Mandel is an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Ocean Engineering at the University of New Hampshire. Her lab works to understand the natural physical processes that occur at ocean boundaries and coasts, using a combination of laboratory experiments and field observations. A large focus of this work is on the physics of how water interacts with coastal ecosystems, and how we can better protect, restore, and consider these systems in engineering decisions. Tracy received her B.S. in Environmental Engineering from Cornell University and her M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. She is the recipient of the 2018 Lorenz G. Straub Award for most meritorious doctoral dissertation in hydraulic engineering, ecohydraulics, and related fields, as well as a 2024 NSF CAREER Award.
