Scott Spurgeon

Background

About Scott Spurgeon

Scott Spurgeon is a Research Civil Engineer at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Coastal & Hydraulics Laboratory (CHL) within the Coastal Engineering Branch, as part of the Joint Airborne Lidar Bathymetric Technical Center of Expertise. Scott earned his Master of Science in Civil Engineering with a coastal focus from the University of South Alabama in 2022, following a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the same institution in 2020. Scott’s research expertise lies in coastal engineering resilience, leveraging geospatial data and numerical modeling. His notable projects include co-leading the Next Generation Volume Change Tools initiative under the Coastal Inlets Research Program (CIRP) and contributing to the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI). In the GLRI project, he developed near-seamless digital elevation models for the Great Lakes and worked on feature extraction for modeling purposes, resulting in several technical and special reports. One of Scott's key achievements is his work on the coastal resilience metrics at Panama City Beach, Florida, which was published in the Journal of Waterway Port Coastal and Ocean Engineering and has been widely downloaded. He also developed the Representative Beach Profile Generator, a Python-based toolset for creating representative beach profiles used in numerical models, which has been successfully applied in various projects. Scott has received several awards, including the Joint Airborne Lidar Bathymetric Technical Center of Expertise Sebastian Sizgoric Technical Achievement Award in 2023 and the Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory Excellence in Customer Care Award in 2021. He is actively involved in leadership and mentorship, having completed the Leadership Development Program Levels 1 and 2 and mentoring new researchers and interns at CHL. In addition to his professional work, Scott is a member of the American Shore and Beach Preservation Association (ASBPA). He has presented his research at various conferences and contributed to multiple publications, including refereed journals and technical reports.