More than 60 percent of the world’s reefs are under a direct threat from local sources such as overfishing, coastal development, and pollution. There have been efforts to replicate these reefs, but designs are often not optimal for reef fish development or for coastal protections. This is a high risk design task that considers factors such as shaped, size, water flow, temperature, and water carbon content. This level of complexity and risk combined with the high number of potential design iterations makes reef design a viable candidate for topology optimization techniques. My work will apply multi-objective functions to the existing artificial reef topology optimization work, optimizing coral reefs for performance in cultivating marine life and sheltering shorelines from storms and erosion.

I am very excited at the opportunity to develop my own project that I feel will make a unique and tangible contribution to the research space. I hope to gain technical experience in optimization methods as well as learn how to conduct a research project and present my findings.