Dilini Herath

Teaching Assistant Professor

Contact information

Education

Ph.D., Civil Engineering, University of South Florida, 2025
M.S., Civil Engineering, University of South Florida, 2021
B.S., Civil Engineering, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, 2017

Professional experience

After completing her undergraduate studies, Dilini began her career as a civil engineer in Sri Lanka, contributing to major water supply projects with the National Water Supply and Drainage Board and international contractors. In these roles, she worked on the planning and coordination of the construction of treatment plants, intake structures, reservoirs and distribution systems designed to expand reliable access to safe drinking water. She later pursued graduate studies in the United States, earning master's in civil engineering with an emphasis on water resources and a doctorate in civil engineering from the University of South Florida. Her doctoral research combined computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with environmental fluid mechanics to investigate oceanographic processes, particularly coastal flows influenced by varying forcing conditions. She joined Kansas State University as a teaching assistant professor in civil engineering in fall 2025.

Research

Dilini’s research applies CFD to a wide range of engineering and environmental problems. Her early work focused on modeling the turbulent flow dynamics involved in vehicle hydroplaning, where she developed a computationally efficient approach to study water behavior near the tire contact patch, addressing a critical safety issue in transportation engineering. Building on this foundation, she advanced CFD methods to investigate turbulence and transport in coastal ocean environments. She developed a novel Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes, or RANS, -based framework to capture the interactions among waves, currents and tides in shallow coastal waters. This work revealed how different forcing conditions influence vertical mixing, cross-shelf transport and flow structures, while also introducing an efficient method to incorporate temporal variability of tidal flows into coastal simulations. The framework provides a foundation for parameterizing turbulence in larger-scale ocean circulation models, enhancing the predictive skill of regional and global climate simulations.

Academic highlights

Dilini was awarded the American Society of Civil Engineers – West Coast Branch scholarship for the 2022–2023 academic year. She has demonstrated a strong commitment to teaching, serving as a teaching associate during graduate school and completing instructional training to prepare for college teaching. She also contributed to the development of a storm surge model for Hurricane Ian that was featured in the Tampa Bay Times in 2022, highlighting the societal relevance of her research. Her work has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, the leading journal in the field, and has been presented at major professional meetings, including the AGU Ocean Sciences Meeting and the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics Annual Meeting.