I suppose that as perhaps the earliest student of Dr. Nicholas C. Kraus, I was chosen to write this Introduction. I knew Nick since 1979, when I met him in Tokyo during a one-month visit I made to Japan to learn about research on Coastal Engineering. I subsequently found out that the Tokyo group did not know what to do with me and they asked Nick, who was working at the Nearshore Environment Research Center with Professor Kiyoshi Horikawa, to handle the visit. The rest is history as they say, with more than 40 publications written together in my case.
This volume is an outcome of presentations at the “NCK Symposium” held in honor of Nick at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Florida, in March 2009. Co-Chairs for the symposium were Dr. Gary Zarillo at FIT and his wife Kim – who served as host, Dr. Julie Dean...
