Forrest M. Holly - The Advisor and Mentor: My Graduate Education Journey

In this abstract, I attempt to capture how Dr. Forrest Holly provided substantial guidance throughout my graduate education, and significantly shaped my professional career. Dr. Holly’s emphasis on work ethics and integrity are truly unparalleled. By the Spring of 1992, I already completed my M.S. degree under his guidance, and was starting my PhD degree. For my M.S. research, I worked on an approach to model wave propagation over dry-bed channels; a topic that is fairly abstract and purely mathematical in nature. My aspirations for a more “colorful” PhD topic were squashed when Dr. Holly presented this statement: “I can never get CHARIMA (a one-dimensional dynamic-wave channel routing code) to work for high Froude number scenarios. I want to find out why. Is it Preissmann scheme? Solve that problem and that would be your PhD.” It was not the most exciting proposition, but I found it challenging. The research required substantial knowledge about the flow characteristics of the subcritical, critical, and supercritical regimes, and the transitions among them. I solicited input from Dr. Fotis Sotiropoulos on the state-of-knowledge in aerospace computing. I also delved into stability analysis of various numerical schemes in an attempt to understand the sources of instabilities that occurs as Froude number approaches the critical value of one. Naively, I returned to Forrest after nearly six-months of investigation with the trivial conclusion that “CHARIMA will not work for Transcritical Flow.” Given that CHARIMA was Forrest’s work horse model, the conclusion was swiftly rejected. He did find the term “Transcritical” rather amusing though. To the best of my knowledge, that term did not exist before I published it in 1994 at the ASCE National Conference in Buffalo NY. I returned to my investigations with two objectives: Formulate a proof that the Preissmann scheme does not work for transcritical flow; and develop/identify a robust numerical scheme that can handle Transcritical flow. The presentation will articulate how these two objectives were met and how the MESH scheme was developed/identified for dynamic wave channel routing. Most importantly, the presentation will highlight how Forrest completely shaped my professional ethics and principles; as he did throughout his career for many. His trade mark was the strong emphasis on the basic principals of hydraulics and the foundations of fluid mechanics. Further, Dr. Holly relentlessly instilled in me the importance of work-life balance; a concept missed by many.