UEL academic secures prestigious Daiwa award
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Published
09 January 2026
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As rising sea levels and increasingly extreme weather place growing pressure on coastlines worldwide, a University of East London (UEL) academic has secured a prestigious international research award to lead a major UK-Japan collaboration advancing understanding of how beaches respond to erosion and flooding.
Dr Ravindra Jayaratne, reader in coastal engineering at the University’s School of Architecture, Computing and Engineering, has been awarded a Daiwa Foundation Award 2025 by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, supporting an ambitious new research project in Japan that will advance understanding of how coastlines respond to storm waves and sediment movement.
The 18-month project, which begins this month (January 2026), will bring together leading researchers from the UK and Japan to investigate sediment transport in the swash zone - the highly dynamic area where waves meet the shoreline. Although this zone plays a critical role in shaping beaches and influencing erosion and flooding, it remains one of the least understood parts of the coastal system.
Working with partners at Yokohama National University (YNU), Japan’s Port and Airport Research Institute (PARI) and the engineering consultant, Fudo Tetra Corporation, the research team will deliver a unique programme of field and laboratory studies. A central element of the project will be an intensive field campaign at the Hasaki Oceanographic Research Station (HORS) in Chiba, Japan - an internationally- recognised coastal observation site with decades of continuous beach profile surveys and hydrodynamic records.
Despite the global importance of the Hasaki site, high-resolution measurements of suspended sediment in the swash zone remain limited. The project will address this gap by combining field observations with highly-controlled laboratory experiments in wave flumes at UEL and YNU. By directly comparing natural and laboratory conditions, the team aims to improve sediment transport predictive models and resolve long-standing questions around scale effects in coastal engineering.
The research has strong practical relevance. Improved modelling of sediment dynamics in wave-breaking zones will strengthen predictions of shoreline change, erosion and flooding, helping to inform coastal management and disaster risk reduction strategies in both the UK and Japan. The project will also offer hands-on training for postgraduate research students and early-career researchers at UEL and YNU through joint fieldwork, laboratory campaigns, mathematical and numerical modelling and international workshops.
The Daiwa Foundation Awards are highly competitive and support collaborative projects that deepen institutional partnerships between the UK and Japan across academic, cultural and professional fields, with a strong emphasis on long-term impact.
This award builds on Dr Jayaratne’s previous engagement with the Foundation. In 2018, he was a co-investigator of a successful UK-Japan project with UEL, University College London and Kansai University, exploring community engagement in preparing for natural water-related disasters with different time scales and magnitudes, laying the foundations for sustained collaboration between the two countries.
On receiving the award, Dr Jayaratne said,
This project brings together an exceptional team - four coastal engineers with different skillset and experience - and a truly unique field site. The Daiwa Award makes it possible to link detailed field measurements in Japan with advanced laboratory studies in the UK, helping us to answer fundamental questions about coastal change while strengthening long-term collaboration between our institutions.