Xinyi Kang, a Ph.D. candidate in the Marine-Estuarine Environmental Science (MEES) Program, successfully defended her dissertation titled Impacts of winds and tides on the exchange dynamics and mixing in Maryland Coastal Bays.
Her years of research, under the direction of Dr. Meng Xia, has involved studying the misunderstood hydrodynamics of small shallow coastal lagoon systems that have limited river flow and shallow bathymetry. He offers that “to address these knowledge gaps, this study applied a state-of-the-art Finite Volume Community Ocean Model to comprehensively instigate the inlet flux exchange, as well as stratification and their mixing mechanisms in a typical small shallow coastal lagoon (MCBs) on multiple spatial and temporal scales. A comprehensive understanding of the hydrodynamics in the MCBs could help to further investigate the potential water quality and blue larvae transport studies. The method in this study can be also applied to other similar lagoon systems along the U.S. coast.”
Kang expects to graduate this fall and plans to work in a research institution or university as she continues her academic career. A native of Yantai, a seaside city on the east coast of China, Kang came to UMES from Ocean University of China where she earned an undergraduate degree in marine technology. Her research interests include coastal hydrodynamics.
“There are a lot of things that attracted me to UMES,” said Kang. “I especially like the research interests of my advisor, Dr. Meng Xia, which is to solve estuarine problems. The kind environment of UMES – the professors, the staff and the students –also attracted me.
