Early Career Spotlight

Temitope Idowu


Tell us about yourself:

My name is Temitope Idowu. I am a civil engineer and a PhD Candidate (Coastal specialization) at the University of Delaware, USA working with Dr. Jack Puleo on creating novel insights into the migration and burial of variable density munitions in nearshore environments. Originally from Nigeria, I hold a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the Federal University of Technology, Akure Nigeria (2012) and a master’s in civil and environmental engineering from Kenya, East Africa (2017). My M.Sc. was jointly conferred by Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology and the African Union-sponsored Pan African University. Before starting my current Ph.D. research on munitions in nearshore coastal environments in the Fall of 2020, I worked and collaborated on a range of topics such as the groundwater characterization and seawater intrusion into the coastal aquifers of Mombasa, Kenya, flood risk mapping of Ibadan, Nigeria and a number of other topics encompassing the application of GIS and remote sensing techniques for efficient delineation of different environmental phenomena.

 

What is your research about?

My current Ph.D. research aims to understand how variable-density munitions migrate, appear, along coastlines due to extreme storm events using physical experiments. Munitions are unexploded ordnance (e.g., missiles, BLU bombs) from past military activities that were disposed of in the Oceans. However, due to extreme events like storms and hurricanes, they sometimes get washed up on coastlines. This constitutes an environmental risk, especially to US coastlines which has over 400 former munition dumping sites spread across the US coastal waters. Munitions have reappeared in the Gulf of Mexico and along the coastlines of at least 16 states ranging from New Jersey to Hawaii. Predicting how munitions migrate to the shorelines is an extremely difficult task due to the complex interplay of the natural processes contributing to munitions mobility. However as with all natural stochastic phenomena, if enough observations can be made, it is possible to create probabilistic predictions of how these objects behave based on their intrinsic properties and the prevailing hydromorphological forcings. This is where my research comes in. The ultimate goal of my research is to create robust quantifications on the migration and burial of munitions under different forcing conditions using physical models. In the summer of 2021, I and the rest of the team conducted a series of experiments on munitions migration in a double dam-break flume, and in the summer of 2022, as the lead PhD student of the project, I worked alongside several researchers across the globe in the 120 m x 5 m x 5 m wave flume located in INRS Quebec Canada -the largest flume of its type in North America for generating what is arguably the most comprehensive quantification of munitions behavior in the nearshore environment. I’m currently creating simple probabilistic models from the quantifications. The work is sponsored by DOD’s Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program, which is also supported by DoE and EPA.

 

What excites you about your research?

The new challenges every day like constantly thinking of ways to organize, clean, analyze, and interpret the different aspects of the massive datasets obtained during the experiments. Of course, I’m not denying the fact that it can be frustrating at times, but I won’t trade the thrill and exhilaration one gets when a code finally works or something interesting is discovered for anything else. Another exciting perk of the research for me is the opportunity to travel to different places for conferences. I have been able to present my research to a wide range of audiences across the United States and beyond. In December 2022, I presented at one of the foremost coastal engineering conferences hosted in Australia and more recently I presented at the AGU Fall2023 meeting in San Francisco in December 2023 where I also emerged as one of the top five and the eventual winner of the AGU Fall meeting photo contest.

 

What broader importance does your research have for society?

The broad impact of my research is far-reaching as the applications of the outcomes of my study could save lives. The quantifications from the study help create simple relationships between the munition bulk density values, hydromorphodynamics, and the munitions migration and burial. This knowledge is particularly important for project managers in charge of the clean-up of marine sites with munitions contamination in determining where resources should be channeled, or which sites should be focused on at a given time. Furthermore, existing Bayesian-based models like the UnMES (Underwater Munitions Expert System) will immensely benefit from my qualifications for creating a reliable management system for munitions disposed in marine environments over a century or many decades back and predicting their migrations. Ultimately, all these efforts contribute to making our coastlines safer for the public and more resilient.

 

What inspired you to pursue a career in Earth Science?

Growing up, I was lucky to have great mentors who were civil engineers but my interest in earth science was ignited by a major storm-induced flooding back in my home country, Nigeria in July 2012 which resulted in the loss of 363 lives, and displacement of 2.1 million people nationally. The experience set me on the path towards seeking to better understand environmental, and coastal problems and contribute to proffering solutions. Hence when I won the African Union-sponsored scholarship opportunity to pursue a master’s in civil engineering, I geared my research towards coastal groundwater and GIS applications, an essential component of earth science. On the project, I explored groundwater geochemistry and seawater intrusion at a city-wide and regional scale in Kenya, and East Africa, respectively. In the ensuing years, I have worked on and published papers on other topics such as dam potential, coastline change assessment, groundwater potential, urban growth prediction, and urban heat island. I also realized that over the years research has evolved and the world is leaning more towards inter-disciplinary research where researcher with varying perspectives based on their background come together and holistically tackle research questions through the combined lenses of the different backgrounds. That inspired me to pursue a Ph.D. that focuses more on the physics of the coastal processes in addition to my GIS and geochemistry-related background before the start of my Ph.D. study.

 

What are you looking to do after you complete your PhD or postdoc?

Upon the completion of my Ph.D., I intend to continue in academia by seeking a tenure-track assistant professor role or a postdoc. However, I am also open to research-based roles in the industry with an option of part-role in academia as an adjunct professor. In these roles, I intend to pursue environmental sustainability, adaptation, and resilience topics with a bias for coastal environments. More importantly, I am seeking ways to incorporate machine learning techniques to further push the boundaries of the existing frontiers in these niche areas.

 

Given unlimited funding and access to resources, what is your dream project that you would pursue?

Wow! Great question. I will let my imagination run wild on that. However, the foremost project that comes to mind would be a project that focuses on understanding the behavior of marine plastic wastes and contributing to state-of-the-art technologies for managing and drastically reducing these wastes globally. Official records indicate that marine plastic wastes have negatively impacted at least 267 species globally in the form of fatalities due to ingestion, suffocation, starvation, drowning, infection, and entanglement. Hence, I am super passionate about this particular project.

 

What else do you do? Any hobbies or interests outside of work?

Photography!!! I would say this is an interest I have carried with me long before my research journey. Before DSLR cameras became a thing, I remember owning a film camera as a teenager in high school, and over the years I have developed my skills in the more advanced aspects of photography. My shoots are mostly nature-themed but have a little bit of everything else – lifestyle, landscape, cityscape, and abstract. I do incorporate photography into my research as well, primarily for the sake of memories but also for the aesthetics. My photo entry on Lake Victoria, the largest freshwater lake of its kind in the world won the Fall 2023 edition of the AGU Photo contest.

For more information about Temitope visit his LinkedIn page

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Temitope Idowu drives one of the scaffold pipes for sensor deployment during a field trip to Cape Shores, Delaware.