Coastal Disasters: Understanding Tsunamis and Storm Surges

Tomoya Shibayama, born in Tokyo in 1953, currently serves as Institute Professor at Chuo University after a distinguished career at Waseda University where he is now Professor Emeritus. After completing his doctoral studies at the University of Tokyo, he built an impressive academic career spanning the University of Tokyo, Asian Institute of Technology, and Yokohama National University before joining Waseda University in 2009. His four-decade career has focused on coastal disaster mitigation through hydraulic laboratory experiments, field surveys, and numerical analysis. He directed Waseda's Institute for Research on Reconstruction from the Great East Japan Earthquake and later led the Institute for Sustainable Future Society. His research encompasses coastal engineering, tsunami studies, and storm surge disaster prevention, with over 319 published works garnering more than 4,000 citations. His expertise has been recognized with the 2019 Hamaguchi Award for Enhancement of Tsunami/Coastal Disaster Resilience. Through his work at the Composed Crisis Research Institute, he has championed an interdisciplinary approach to disaster prevention, integrating knowledge from engineering, science, energy policy, and regional management to protect coastal communities.