Dr. Marcelo Garcia holds an endowed chair in Hydraulics at the University of Illinois-Urbana – where he has taught for more than thirty years, and runs the remarkable Ven Te Chow hydraulic and sediment laboratory. 

His award page reads like a who’s-who of the Legends in our field.  
These include but are not limited to:
The Einstein Award, 
the Rouse Award, 
and the Yalin lifetime achievement award.

And he is a Distinguished member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the an elected fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

And that’s all very impressive.  Dr. Garcia is - without question – one of the leading quantitative sediment scientists of his generation.

But the quality that made this conversation remarkable, is Marcello’s grasp and deep connection with the history of the sediment transport and river mechanics disciplines.

It became clear that he sees his work in continuity with the foundational work and scientists that preceded him.  He has effortlessly describes how modern sediment transport principles or puzzles are rooted in the work and lives of our discipline’s historic figures.

And, well, these are some of the big themes I hoped for with this podcast.

This is also why he was uniquely qualified to the 10-year project of compiling the American Society of Civil Engineers Manual of Practice on Sedimentation (110) – arguably the most comprehensive work on sediment science and engineering available. 

We talked about that project, how he collaborated with dozens of authors to knit together this massive compendium of sediment and river insight.  But in the process, I learned a lot, not only about some of the big ideas in our disciplines, but also the stories of the people behind them and how they became some of our big ideas.

The ASCE Manual of Practice is here: https://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/40856%28200%2994

This series was funded by the Regional Sediment Management (RSM) program.

Mike Loretto edited the first three seasons and created the theme music.
Tessa Hall is editing most of Season 4.

Stanford Gibson (HEC Sediment Specialist) hosts.

Video shorts and other bonus content are available at the podcast website:
https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/confluence/rasdocs/rastraining/latest/the-rsm-river-mechanics-podcast

...but most of the supplementary videos are available on the HEC Sediment YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/stanfordgibson

If you have guest recommendations or feedback you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or ResearchGate or fill out this recommendation and feedback form: https://forms.gle/wWJLVSEYe7S8Cd248