River Flows Onward

Having reached the end of my 4-year tenure as Chief Editor of the ASCE Journal of Hydraulic Engineering (JHE), I am pleased to welcome the new Chief Editor, Dr. Thanos Papanicolaou. Dr. Papanicolaou has recently taken the position of Professor and Henry Goodrich Chair of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. He previously served as Professor and Donald E. Bently Faculty Fellow of Engineering at the University of Iowa. Before that, he was a member of the faculty at Washington State University. Dr. Papanicolaou earned a B.S. with honors in civil engineering from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is a past Chair of the Hydraulics and Waterways Council of the Environmental and Water Resources Institute of ASCE, an ASCE Walter Huber Award Fellow, and a Distinguished Member of the Iowa Academy of Sciences. He has served as an Associate Editor of JHE, the Journal of Hydrologic Engineering, the Soil and Water Conservation Journal, the Journal of Sediment Research, and Water Resources Research. I am confident that the Journal is in good hands as we move forward to meet the challenges facing peer-reviewed journals.

I want to take this opportunity to express my appreciation and admiration of the JHE Associate Editors with whom I have worked closely over the past 4 years. Their dedicated, diligent work has created a journal of which we can all be proud. I have derived great satisfaction from experiencing the mutual respect and camaraderie of a group of committed professionals who share a vision of excellence for the Journal.

No peer-reviewed journal can survive without the tireless labor of reviewers who toil anonymously to help authors produce the best papers possible. During my tenure as Chief Editor, I have been continuously awed by the outstanding technical quality of manuscript reviews for the Journal. There is no higher service to the profession, in my mind, than these selfless contributions of individuals dedicated to advancing the technical knowledge base for hydraulic engineers.

To the authors and potential authors of articles in JHE, and in particular to young people just beginning in the profession of hydraulic engineering, I remain steadfastly convinced that it is an extraordinary time to be a hydraulic engineer. We have a significant role to play in solving the problems of global warming, resource sustainability, and infrastructure renewal. I would submit that we are making progress on those fronts. In the past 4 years, we have seen significant advancements in computational fluid dynamics and in both field and laboratory instrumentation techniques to solve hydraulic engineering problems with a new level of fundamental understanding of the fluid mechanics associated with, for example, hydraulic structures, fish passage, dense jets, dam breaks, sediment transport, flow-through vegetation, scour of sediment, and pipe networks. These topics are all covered in the most recent issue of JHE (March 2014 as of this writing).

I am very grateful for the able assistance of the ASCE journals staff over the past 4 years. Their encouragement and guidance through some complex situations have been invaluable.

Finally, I want to thank my wife for patiently waiting for me to emerge from my total immersion in the Journal for the past 4 years. Looking ahead, I plan to continue my teaching, research, and writing activities. Hopefully, we will meet at a conference in the future, albeit without me having to answer the inevitable question, “Where is my paper?”!