Profiles of Two JOMAE Associate Editors (The Fourth in a Continuing Series)

For 35 years, beginning in 1987, the ASME Journal of Offshore Mechanics and Arctic Engineering has provided a platform for researchers, practitioners, and interested parties working in the ocean, offshore, arctic, and related fields to present peer-reviewed research on all aspects of analysis, design, and technology development. The journal primarily showcases fundamental research and development studies but has also featured review articles and perspectives on both, established topics as well as emerging topics.

As in recent Editorials [1–3] that appeared in June 2019, August 2020, and October 2021 issues of the journal, I once again emphasize that it is through the efforts and dedication of an international team of Associate Editors that the journal remains vibrant and continued to offer a forum for quality in the field. Today, the journal has 34 Associate Editors who cover the breadth of areas in offshore mechanics and arctic engineering; they represent 13 countries, namely, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Norway, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States. With support from hard-working reviewers, the Associate Editors help realize this journal six times a year.

I am delighted to continue the series profiling two Associate Editors and highlighting their expertise areas and accomplishments; this continues the series [1–3] that I encourage you to review to learn about previously profiled Associate Editors. In this issue, I present to you two Associate Editors—Dr. Ying Min Low, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the National University of Singapore, and Prof. Felice Arena, Director of the Natural Ocean Engineering Laboratory at the Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria in Italy.

Dr. Ying Min Low (Fig. 1) is an associate professor, since 2018, in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He also serves as Associate Head of Administration in the department. He studied at Imperial College in London from 1996 to 2000, obtaining a Master of Engineering degree with first-class honors. His passion for research was kindled while working on his final-year project and developed an analytical method for predicting the flexural response of tubular members with nonlinear stress–strain characteristics. The project was recognized with a best project award in the cohort, and the work was subsequently published in the Journal of Constructional Steel Research.

After his Master’s studies, Ying Min returned to his home country of Singapore and worked as a research engineer in the Institute of High Performance Computing from 2000 to 2002, and as a senior engineer in Keppel FELS Ltd. from 2002 to 2003. In 2003, he was awarded an overseas scholarship by Nanyang Technological University (NTU) to groom its faculty; this gave him the valuable opportunity to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge. For his doctoral studies, Ying Min worked on the coupled analysis of floating systems and developed a hybrid time/frequency domain approach for efficient coupled analysis of vessel/mooring/riser dynamics. After completing his dissertation, he joined NTU as a faculty member in 2007 and subsequently moved to NUS in 2014. Over his academic career, Dr. Ying Min Low has published over 80 peer-reviewed articles and supervised 13 Ph.D. students.

Dr. Low’s research primarily deals with the probabilistic analysis of offshore structures, in particular fatigue reliability and extreme response prediction of offshore structures subjected to stochastic wave loads. To mention one notable contribution, he developed a new four-parameter probability distribution named the shifted generalized lognormal distribution (SGLD). The SGLD model has many advantages over other models; it is flexible and can be used to represent a wide range of skewness/kurtosis values, thus enabling it to approximate many well-known distributions. It includes several theoretical distributions (e.g., normal, lognormal, exponential power, Laplace, and uniform) as special cases. The model is effective for various engineering problems, including for describing nonlinear ocean waves, non-Gaussian stochastic processes, moment-based reliability analysis, and fatigue damage uncertainty prediction. Dr. Low’s work dealing with the SGLD model development [4] was published in 2013, and it has caught the attention of the community (over 70 citations in Scopus).

In addition to research activities, Dr. Low is on the editorial board for the journals: Marine Structures and Ocean Engineering. He has served on the Specialist Committee V.8 Subsea Systems in the International Ship and Offshore Structures Congress (ISSC) for two terms (2012–2015 and 2015–2018). He is a topic organizer at the annual OMAE conferences that are associated with this journal and with the Ocean, Offshore and Arctic Engineering (OOAE) division of ASME, and has been organizing the session on Reliability of Mooring and Riser Systems since 2012. In recognition of his contributions, he was a recipient of the OMAE Appreciation Award in 2019. In addition, he serves on the scientific committee of several other conferences, including the International Symposium on Reliability Engineering and Risk Management (ISRERM).

In Dr. Low’s own words: “Digital technologies are changing the marine and offshore industry. With the vast amount of data collected from sensors installed on offshore assets, and aided by machine learning, digital technologies provide the means for monitoring, control, inspection, fault identification, predictive maintenance, and repairs. Digital twins of offshore structures and subsea systems allow engineers to operate, monitor, and control their assets more closely and accurately predict failures. This results in major cost savings, increased productivity, and improvement in the health, safety, and environment of workers, and minimizing greenhouse emissions.” In this connection, he is currently working on a project involving real-time risk assessment of offshore structures using digital twin methods.

Prof. Felice Arena (Fig. 2) is the Director, since 2009, of the Natural Ocean Engineering Laboratory (NOEL) at the “Mediterranea” University of Reggio Calabria (UNIRC). His research activity, over more than 25 years, relates to short-term and long-term statistics of ocean waves, sea storms, nonlinear random waves and extreme waves, offshore engineering, wave energy converters, and wind energy offshore. He has authored more than 250 papers, published in international journals, books, and conference proceedings.

Since 2005, Prof. Arena has served as a member of the Scientific Committee for the OOAE Division’s “Structures, Safety and Reliability (SSR)” symposium at the annual OMAE conferences. He was Senior Member for PIANC (The World Association for Waterborne Transport Infrastructure) of the Working Group “Renewable Energy for Maritime Ports” between 2012 and 2019. He currently serves as a member of the International Ship Structures Committee V.6 on Ocean Space Utilization. He also serves until 2025 on the Scientific Advisory Committee for MaREI, a Research Centre for Energy, Climate and Marine, coordinated by the Environmental Research Institute (ERI) at University College Cork, Ireland.

Prof. Arena is an associate editor of the “ASME Journal of Offshore Mechanics and Arctic Engineering” and is on the editorial board of Elsevier’s “Probabilistic Engineering Mechanics.”

He won ASME’s “OMAE 2011 SSR Best Paper Award” for the paper “Space–Time Extremes in Sea Storms,” coauthored by F. Fedele and M. A. Tayfun [5].

He served as a joint editor with G. Failla of a Theme Issue for the Philosophical Transactions A of the Royal Society of London (February 2015, Vol. 373, No. 2035) on “New Perspectives in Offshore Wind Energy” and for two Special Issues in “Probabilistic Engineering Mechanics” on stochastic mechanics (Vol. 35, pp. 1–124, January 2014 and Vol. 54, pp. 1–146, October 2018).

Prof. Arena has advised over 100 undergraduate and M.S. graduate students. He served as a mentor for 19 Ph.D. students and is advising 1 Ph.D. student in Ocean Engineering. He has also mentored 11 post-doctoral scholars. He has been the scientific supervisor (principal investigator) of many international and Italian projects—on offshore engineering and marine energy. In particular, he was a scientific supervisor for the project, PLENOSE, supported by Marie Curie action FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IRSES (2014–2018) and was scientific coordinator of the European Project, REWEC 3—2013-IT-92050-S, supported by the EU’s TEN-T Program, on wave energy exploitation in the Port of Civitavecchia.

Prof. Arena has been leading the UNIRC unit of the Horizon 2020 “The Blue Growth Farm” project, supported within the call, H2020-BG-2017-1 (project duration, 2018–2022). One significant task on the project is the installation of a 1:15 model of a multipurpose floating platform at NOEL, that is to jointly manage fish farming, a wind turbine, and wave energy converters (Fig. 3). The model of this floating platform is 10 m × 14 m.

Prof. Arena founded WAVENERGY.IT, a spinoff of the Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria, which was established to develop devices for wave energy exploitation.¹ With support from this spinoff, he has supervised two projects for the construction of two REWEC3 (REsonant Wave Energy Converter, realization 3) wave energy converters, deployed in breakwaters in the Port of Civitavecchia (Port of Rome) and in the Port of Salerno, both in Italy.

In Prof. Arena’s own words: “One of the main challenges of offshore engineering is the development of multifunctional projects for the use of ocean space, taking into account the exploitation of renewable energies at sea—for example, wind, waves, and sun. We could work on the design of floating cities, offshore islands for fish farms, and so on. This will require a lot of work by the research groups on individual systems (offshore wind turbines, WECs, etc.) for the integration of numerical modeling activities with data from monitoring and measurement activities on small- and full-scale models, if available. Results from such studies will lead to improvements in the criteria for prediction of climate change effects on metocean extremes, in the modeling of the entire multifunctional systems, and in structural design.”