Ryan Clark is Deputy Director of Strategic Partnerships with more than a decade of experience in large, multidisciplinary coastal projects in both the private and public sectors.
His recent work at the Institute includes conducting research on the efficiency of dredging for coastal restoration. He oversees student researchers, and has presented progress and findings at the 2014 Conference on Ecological and Ecosystem Restoration (CEER) and the 2014 United States Army Corps of Engineers – Mississippi Valley Division & Gulf Coast Regional Dredging Meeting.
He is also Principal Investigator for the Project Development & Implementation Program/Upper Barataria Risk Reduction Study. He manages the schedule, budget, and technical direction of a project with three subcontractors, which involves the incorporation of rainfall into a suite of hydrologic and damage models to evaluate proposed coastal protection structures.
Prior to joining The Water Institute of the Gulf, Clark was a Project Scientist at ARCADIS, an international consultancy based in The Netherlands. He served in the Integrated Water Resources Planning practice as the Co-project Manager for the United States Army Corps of Engineers/Federal Emergency management Agency Joint Coastal Surge Study. His duties included scope and budget creation and management for a large, multi-agency, multidisciplinary, and multinational coastal surge study.
Clark provided technical, database management, and GIS support for a project developing a comprehensive sediment management plan for the Atchafalaya Basin, the only region along the Louisiana coast that is currently experiencing land gain through deltaic formation.
Clark was part of the team that developed Louisiana’s 2012 Coastal Master Plan. He served as a local liaison to the Master Plan project team and as a High-Performance Computing Principle Investigator for the usage of LSU/ Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI) supercomputers utilized in the project. He performed reviews of storm surge modeling results, and contributed to the hydrodynamic component of the final report.
Clark earned a Bachelor of Science in geology from Louisiana State University, and a Master of Science in earth and ecosystems science from Tulane University. He is a Registered Professional Geologist. He was elected as the President-Elect of the Society for Ecological Restoration – Large-scale Ecosystem Restoration Section in 2014.
