Tufts Professor Farshid Vahedifard and team joined the Stone Living Lab Research and Monitoring Committee

by Dr. Katie Dafforn

In February, the Stone Living Lab welcomed Professor Farshid Vahedifard and members of his research group from Tufts University’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering for a meeting of our Research and Monitoring Committee. Joining Dr. Vahedifard were his lab group Julian Kelly, Mohammed Azhar, Dana Redhuis, Julio Copana, and Haoqing Yang who shared about their projects over the lunch that followed.

We opened the session with an overview of the Lab’s current work and the vision guiding our next five years. We described our cobble berm research, exploring how dynamic, nature-based structures protect shorelines; our living seawall installations, which combine coastal protection with habitat creation; and developments in our climate change observatory, which combines long-term and real-time monitoring to help us understand changing coastal conditions. We also highlighted progress on our salt marsh health assessment on Cathleen Stone Island.

Dr. Vahedifard then described a series of projects underway in his lab. Dr. Vahedifard’s research sits at the intersection of civil and geotechnical engineering, climate change, resilient infrastructure, and environmental justice. His work examines how infrastructure, such as levees, responds to extreme events including drought, flooding, wildfires, and compound or cascading hazards, with a focus on equity.

During the visit, the group shared how they incorporate sequences of events into lifecycle fatigue assessments, important for designing infrastructure that performs under real-world conditions such as drought-flood cycles. They also discussed applied work on Mississippi River levee systems, responses to wildfire-affected landscapes in California, and a recently developed portfolio of 39 flood adaptation measures, each evaluated for its advantages, disadvantages, co-benefits, and tradeoffs.

Dr. Vahedifard’s contributions to infrastructure resilience are widely recognized. His research has been supported by NSF, USDA, NOAA, NASA, and the Department of Defense, and he has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed publications, and mentored over 50 postdocs and graduate students.

As we look ahead to the next phase of the Stone Living Lab’s research agenda, visits like this one remind us of the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration. We are grateful to Dr. Vahedifard, Julian, Mohammed, Dana, Julio, and Haoqing for their time, insights, and shared commitment to building resilient and equitable coastal communities.