Rate My Professor Ioannis Karmpadakis

Ioannis Karmpadakis is an Associate Professor in Coastal Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, at Imperial College London. He serves as the Director of the Hydrodynamics Laboratory, a state-of-the-art facility spanning approximately 3000 square meters in the basement of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Building on the South Kensington Campus. The laboratory is equipped with six wave flumes and two wave basins capable of simulating waves, winds, and currents in multiple directions, featuring active-absorption control systems for realistic ocean conditions. It supports experiments at various scales with advanced instrumentation including ADV, PIV, lasers, force sensors, high-speed cameras, and custom prototypes manufactured in-house by a specialized technical team. Karmpadakis holds a PhD and conducts research in coastal engineering, focusing on stochastic descriptions of waves and related processes, including extreme waves, wave heights, crest heights, wave breaking, nonlinear waves in shallow water depths, coastal processes, erosion, wave-structure interactions, and marine renewables.

His academic interests encompass hydrodynamics, experimental fluid mechanics, hydrodynamic modeling, coastal oceanography, ocean modeling, physical oceanography, and coastal processes. Karmpadakis teaches modules on coastal engineering, wave mechanics, and statistics. He supervises PhD students such as Umniya Al Khalili, Yusuf Almalki, Vasilis Bellos, Steven Huo, Lucy Mao, and William Wright on topics including wave predictions, nature-based reefs, and fluid-structure interactions. Key publications include 'Tsunami-induced loads on coastal structures: Experimental investigation' (2025, Ocean Engineering), 'Experimental assessment and prediction of wave loading around abrupt depth transitions' (2025), 'The influence of directional spreading on rogue waves triggered by abrupt depth transitions' (2023, Journal of Fluid Mechanics), 'Rogue wave occurrence over planar coastal bathymetries' (2024), 'An Efficient Method of Defining the Tail of a Distribution' (2025, OMAE), and 'Numerical Modelling of Extreme Irregular Waves' (thesis-related). His work has garnered over 327 citations on Google Scholar. He leads Imperial HydroLab and contributes to fluid mechanics research groups.