Peter Goodwin

Dr. Peter Goodwin is professor and president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. He is an internationally recognized expert in ecosystem restoration, ecohydraulics, and enhancement of river, wetland and estuarine systems, and he has spent 30 years in higher education. He has participated in the river restoration, coastal wetland sustainability, flood control, and sediment management projects around the world, including Chile and Guatemala, and estuarine and tidal wetland restoration projects on the East, Gulf, and West Coasts of the United States, from Delaware Bay to California.

He is recognized internationally for his research with important contributions in the field of modeling flows, sediment transport, and river channel evolution. He has served as a scientific advisor for several government agencies related to river and wetland management issues, including chairing the Louisiana Coastal Area Science Board. Additional research interests include modeling physical processes in natural and disturbed aquatic systems, quantifying benefits of restoration activities, and integrating models of physical processes and biological responses.

Goodwin is the founding director of the Center for Ecohydraulics Research at the University of Idaho, an interdisciplinary group working on the simulation of ecological response to management actions or changes in physical processes of rivers, lakes, estuaries, and wetlands. He also served a federal appointment as the lead scientist for the Delta Science Program in California, which facilitates synthesis activities across agencies, academia, and organizations to support legally mandated goals of water supply reliability and ecosystem recovery. He led a multi-institutional initiative to craft the Delta Science Plan, ‘One Delta, One Science’ that addresses the development of scientific infrastructure, prioritization of science questions, research funding, peer review, and science synthesis activities to inform water policy in California. He was also director of Idaho’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), a federal-state partnership intended to build research infrastructure and encourage collaboration in states historically having received a low amount of federal research funding.

He has written books on river conservation, environmental aspects of integrated flood management, wetland management, and hydraulic and environmental modeling of coastal, estuarine, and river waters. He has taught undergraduate, graduate and continuing education courses in fluid mechanics, hydraulic engineering, sediment transport, hydrology, computational hydraulics, and interdisciplinary graduate classes on ecosystem restoration and sustainability.