Amanda Xiao

Biography

Amanda Xiao completed her Bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering at China Agricultural University, followed by a Master of Philosophy in Environmental Science from the University of Sydney and a PhD in Physical Oceanography from UNSW Canberra. After completing her PhD, Amanda continued her research at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, where she focused on using numerical models to study marine renewable energy, coastal hydrodynamics, transport processes, and their responses to climate change, human impacts, storm surge, coastal flooding, and resilience. Amanda also received a CSIRO Early Research Career Fellowship, where she designed and led multi-disciplinary research to observe, parameterize, and simulate cohesive sediment transport processes in the Great Barrier Reef.

Research

Amanda has expanded her research experience in a variety field in physical oceanography on the coastal and estuarine scales. Amanda’s research covers broad areas, including estuarine and coastal hydrodynamics, storm surge and coastal flooding modelling, sediment and water quality transport process, tidal stream and wave energy resources characterization, and integrated modelling assessment of impacts of climate change and extreme events on coastal infrastructure and marine ecosystem. Amanda currently leads modelling efforts on the estuarine integrated modelling for the impacts of sediment transport and biogeochemical processes on the GBR ecosystem. Amanda has implemented ocean models with unstructured grids such as FVCOM in Delaware Bay, Fitzroy River and Sydney Harbour estuaries with great success.