Marcelo Garcia elected to the National Academy of Engineering

Marcelo Garcia, an accomplished engineer, scholar, and graduate of the University of Minnesota (MS 1985, Ph.D. 1989), was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineers. Garcia now holds the G.T. Geoffrey Yeh Chair in Civil Engineering and is the Director of the Ven Te Chow Hydrosystems Laboratory in the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. CEGE caught up with him to talk about his latest honor, memories of his time at the University of Minnesota, and his work in hydraulics laboratories. 

CEGE: How is this honor unique among the many you have received?

MG:  It is an incredible honor becoming a member of the National Academy of Engineers. 

It is one of those things that you think might happen, someday, but you kind of put it in the back of your mind and say, well, you know, if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. But you can’t really be thinking about that all the time. 

You never really realize it until it happens. It is not just the honor, it’s knowing that all the work that you have done is recognized by the Academy as having contributed to, essentially, the well-being of people and society as a whole. The work that I do with rivers, sedimentation, and also some of the work on the coastal environment and the submarine environment, is all related to how we work with nature, how we try to understand what nature is telling us, and how we engineer our way through, preserving things and making them sustainable. 

As you said, I have received many awards and recognitions, and I value all of them. But this is something very, very special. 

CEGE:  Hydrology and hydraulics seem to be a very pertinent body of knowledge right now with all the tragic news of sudden and severe floods over the summer. What do you think these events tell us in terms of hydraulics research and response?

MG:  Well, they show not only how fragile life is, but also the idea that things are changing. I mean, nobody can deny that there is something going on with the climate and in these manifestations of extreme events. 

In hydrology and hydraulics, we usually look at data and analyze that data statistically. In the case of a river, we try to associate the flow in the river with some recurrence period, like how often does the water get to this height or this other height. And we might see that, on average, every two years this stream gets to this level, every 10 years it gets a bit higher, and so forth. Then a very extreme event can happen, one like we may or may not have had on record. 

The storm in Texas (July 2025) was a one-in-a-hundred-years storm. Oh, the magnitude of water! What happened in Texas was like a perfect storm, a combination of events. But what does one-in-one-hundred mean if we get two events exceeding that within one year? Our understanding is no longer accurate. What is happening now is that what we thought we knew, it’s not the same anymore. We cannot rely only on our previous knowledge. 

Obviously, nature is telling us something. The magnitude of these events, they basically show that we are not prepared to deal with them. 

This whole issue of flooding and extreme events, like wildfires, and all the things that go on—we need to start looking at this differently and preparing, because obviously, this is not going to get better. Reality is telling us, “Hey,  I mean this!”

I think communities, cities, towns, everybody is going to have to become a champion of dealing with these extreme events. It’s no longer valid to assume the extreme event is not going to happen; you have to prepare for the possibility that it might happen. These events are going to be a challenge. The encouraging news is that we now have the knowledge and technology needed for weather forecasting and flood predictions, and combining them with advances in AI, will help us with flood warnings, emergency responses, and in designing the infrastructure needed for protection of communities and cities.   

CEGE: Speaking of history, what do you recall about your time at the University of Minnesota?

MG:  One of the things that I value the most is the opportunity that the University of Minnesota gave me to study there. When I first came from Argentina, I knew that I wanted to go to a hydraulics lab to study. I wrote to a number of universities in the U.S., and many of them responded. But I felt that the University of Minnesota with the Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory (SAFL) looked like a great place to learn. 

I ended up applying to only two schools. The reason was that, well, you needed to pay for the applications. You have to also remember that at that time everything was done by typing letters sending them by snail mail. So, you had to take the exams, send things off, and wait.

When I received the letter of admission from Professor Heinz Stefan—I still have that letter, you know, I keep all those things—saying “you have been admitted,” “you’re going to get an assistantship,” and so forth, I mean, that was, that was fantastic! And, if you think about it, that’s kind of where it all started for me. 

When I got to Minnesota, the new Civil Engineering Building had just been inaugurated. I spent a lot of time there as a teaching assistant in fluid mechanics. I was 24 years old when I arrived, but somehow, I hadn’t thought about going from a southern latitude to a northern latitude. Minnesota winters are harsh. The winter days get short and everything is dark early. I would come out of the lab and say, wait a minute. It’s only 4:30, what’s going on? So, I had to build up some resilience, you know, to get through that. For me that was a change, coming from Argentina. In terms of latitude, the difference was not that large, but the difference was that the south portion of the hemisphere works differently from the northern portion. It was quite an awakening. 

In my time at Minnesota (September ’83 to December ’89), I made many friends, Chris Ellis, who is retired now, was a researcher at the lab, and Miki Hondzo, we were graduate students together, we were and are still close.

I’m grateful to Minnesota, to the faculty, obviously to my advisor Gary Parker, who is now a at Illinois, but also Heinz Stefan, Roger Arndt, Charles Song, Cesar Farell, and John Gulliver, all the professors that I had at the time. I was a Teaching Assistant for John Gulliver; he’s a very nice person. 

The main thing for me is just to say that I’m extremely grateful to the University of Minnesota because Minnesota gave me the opportunity to pursue my graduate studies.

CEGE: You came here to study at the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory and then you went on to, now, run the Ven Te Chow Laboratory. Can you talk a bit about the two labs?

MG:  Just comparing the two labs, Saint Anthony Falls is a much larger lab. But let me tell you a little bit of the history. There are deep and increasing connections between Saint Anthony Falls and the Ven Te Chow lab. 

In Argentina, where I did my undergraduate degree, there were already connections. I knew about Lorenz Straub, creator of SAFL, because he had done a lot of work with the closure of the Missouri River, and I was working on a project over on the Parana River. So, I knew about Straub, I knew his name. And I knew about the University of Illinois through the books that I used, some were written by faculty from Illinois, in particular, Professor Ven Te Chow, who had written a famous book, Open-Channel Hydraulics. But I never imagined that I’d be going full circle, running the lab started by the professor who wrote my first textbook!

Another reason I never imagined that I was going to end up at the Ven Te Chow Lab was because when I came to Saint Anthony Falls, I thought I’d complete my master’s and then go back home. Then I got enthused and wanted to stay. I got married, my wife Estela joined me in Minnesota, and then I continued on for my Ph.D.

Lorenz Straub, who created SAFL, had been an undergraduate student at Illinois in the early 1900s. He went on to earn his Master’s and his Ph.D. He started as an assistant professor of Mathematics and Mechanics at the University of Minnesota and became a Freeman Scholar and went to Europe to see what the Europeans were doing related to hydraulic laboratories. When he came back from Europe, he wanted to build a hydraulics lab at UMN. That lab ended up being the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory. 

Saint Anthony Falls was a good site for a hydraulics lab because the dam and the head differential would allow them to use the water from the Mississippi River, pass it through the lab, use it to do experiments, and then return the water back into the river. It’s a great idea. No pumps or anything like that needed, it’s natural. So Straub was a student at Illinois, and then he created the Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory. Right there is the first connection.

But there are even deeper connections in the academic lineages of the labs.

Straub’s advisor when he did his Ph.D. at Illinois, was a famous structural engineer called Hardy Cross. Cross was a structural engineer, but he came up with this method to calculate flow in pipe networks. Everybody who studies hydraulics and fluid mechanics knows about the Hardy Cross Method. 

When I was a student at SAFL, Ed Silberman, a professor emeritus, was there, and so was Charles Bowers, the Fluid Mechanics Lab in the Civil Engineering Building, now has his name. I mean, all these people were at the SAFL lab, and Straub started all this. Straub was the advisor of Alvin Anderson, and Alvin Anderson was the advisor of Gary Parker, who was my advisor. Parker is now a professor emeritus at Illinois.

When I graduated, the situation in Argentina was very difficult. There was hyperinflation there when I was finishing up my studies, so I talked with my advisor, Gary Parker, and he said I might want to apply for a faculty job. I applied to a number of places, and I got two job interviews. One was at Purdue and the other at Illinois; Illinois offered me a job. So that’s how I ended up here, basically back to the place where Straub started. He was the founder and the builder of Saint Anthony Falls Lab, so yeah, there is this connection between Minnesota and Illinois.

The hydrosystems lab at UIUC was built by Professor Ven Te Chow, with funding from the State of Illinois and a grant from the National Science Foundation. Ven Te Chow had enough clout to get it built. The hydrosystems lab came to be around 1968, ’69. It has been around for a number of years, but it is not as old as the St Anthony Falls Lab. The original hydrosystems lab was renamed after Prof. Ven Te Chow in 1997.

Another difference between the two labs is that Ven Te Chow Lab is inland. We cannot do what you do at St. Anthony Falls, we cannot take water from the Mississippi River. Here we have to have our own water system. Our lab used to have a big water tank and a sump; water was pumped up to the water tank, and from there into the lab. Then it can be used in the lab to do experiments in flumes and sent back to the sump for recirculation. Between 2018 and 2022, the Hydrosystems Lab building underwent major renovations, including the additions of new office spaces, conference rooms, classrooms, and teaching labs. The Ven Te Chow Lab got a new roof and a new water supply system that replaced the constant head tank with a new sump and variable speed pumps. The Chow Lab preserves the volume of water used for the experiments in the flumes, by recirculating it via a system of trenches on the lab floor.  

The Chow lab has a bit of history that is important, too. The professor who helped design the lab was William Hall Maxwell, also a graduate from the University of Minnesota. He had studied in the Saint Anthony Falls Lab and graduated around 1962 or there abouts. He worked under Straub, but mainly got advice from Joe Wetzel, who was like an associate director in the lab, with a lot of experience with water tunnels having done research for the U.S. Navy. Joe Wetzel was a very decent man who helped me gain my footing at the lab during a physical model study to solve a sedimentation problem in the Minnesota River at Mankato.

Shortly after starting as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Maxwell was charged by Professor Ven Te Chow with the design of the water system in the Hydrosystems lab. He took a lot of ideas from St. Anthony Falls, but he also took ideas from other labs, too. Maxwell completed his doctoral studies at Saint Anthony Falls and received his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering. From St. Anthony Falls he was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois. Chow asked him to design the hydraulics (the pumps and piping system) for the new lab. William (“Hall”) Maxwell played a very important role, and the interesting thing is that he also was a University of Minnesota graduate. Hall Maxwell was my mentor when I arrived at Illinois.

There is this connection in the subject of water between Minnesota and Illinois.

For me, Minnesota was good in many ways. There was so much going on, I made a lot of friends, and we always had visitors coming to the lab. It was the making of me in hydraulics and sedimentation engineering. I feel a true love for the Lab. In fact, last night I slept with a shirt that says, “St. Anthony Falls Laboratory,” so yeah, that’s how far I go with that! 

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The St Anthony Falls Lab was commissioned in 1938. Straub was the director from 1938-1963. As a faculty member at Minnesota, he recruited some of his former students to work there and they later became directors of the lab: Edward Silberman (1963-1974), Alvin Anderson (1974-1975), John Ripkin (1975-1976). The lab was built with the help of the Works Projects Administration. In the early years, SAFL was doing a lot of experiments for the Navy.