Introduction to 30th Hunter Rouse Hydraulic Engineering Lecture

Presented at the Joint IAHR and ASCE Hydraulic Engineering Conference, Vancouver, British Columbia, August 2009.

The Hunter Rouse Hydraulic Engineering Award is one of the most prestigious ASCE awards. It recognizes outstanding contributions to hydraulics and waterways and is named, of course, in honor of Hunter Rouse, Hon.M.ASCE, to recognize the tremendous impact that he had on the fields of fluid mechanics and hydraulic engineering. The Hydraulics and Waterways Council Awards Committee recommends a winner to the EWRI Awards Committee, which obtains approval from the EWRI Governing Board to present the award. As a matter of tradition, the lecture is published in the Journal of Hydraulic Engineering (JHE) after undergoing a peer-review process from selected members of the editorial board. I am very pleased to be able to offer in this issue the paper based on the lecture given by Joseph Hun-wei Lee, F.ASCE, who is currently vice president for research and graduate studies at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).

Professor Lee grew up in Hong Kong and received his B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in civil engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He began his academic career at the University of Delaware but was soon lured to the University of Hong Kong, where he began a rapid rise in both research and administrative capacities at that prestigious university. He became the Redmond Chair professor of civil engineering in 1995 and was dean of engineering from 2000 to 2003 and then pro-vice-chancellor and vice president from 2004 to 2010 before taking office in his current position at HKUST. On a personal note, I was aware of his Ph.D. thesis work at MIT because he was one of an outstanding group of graduate students studying there in the rapidly emerging field of environmental fluid mechanics in the 1970s, but I first met him at the University of Hong Kong in 1991 at one of the best conferences that I have ever attended. He served as coeditor of the Proceedings of the 1991 International Symposium on Environmental Hydraulics. Professor Lee has reprised that role several times since then by organizing and editing the proceedings of a number of important international conferences. His service to the International Association of Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research (IAHR) is also well known, and he is respected as vice president of that organization (2007–2011). In addition to serving as an associate editor of JHE on whom I greatly rely, Professor Lee somehow also finds the time to be the editor of the Journal of Hydro-environment Research.

Professor Lee’s research revolves around the use of hydraulics to solve environmental problems, in particular, the prediction and control of water quality, and he has published widely and authoritatively on this subject. He has acted as an expert consultant on numerous hydro-environmental projects, and he serves on the Advisory Council on the Environment and the Construction Industry Council of the Hong Kong SAR Government and on advisory bodies in Scotland, Germany, and Singapore.

Professor Lee is the first Asia-based academic to receive the Hunter Rouse award, and I am sure that Dr. Rouse would have been proud of that because of the strong ties that he developed with the Asian academic community through former students who studied at the University of Iowa. Professor Lee is also a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, United Kingdom, and a fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering Sciences.

In his paper, Professor Lee summarizes both his past and current research on the mixing of multiple turbulent buoyant jets with applications to offshore sewage disposal and the discharge of power plant cooling water effluents. Professor Lee also discusses some interesting unconventional applications of the mixing induced by jets. It is most encouraging that his paper is not only about the merging of jets but in a broader sense, reflects the merging of sound experimental work and current CFD techniques, which is at the forefront of modern hydraulic engineering research and practice.