Ben Chacon, Ph.D.

Ben Chacon joined RMA in 2010 and has focused on development of computational models for HEC. He has helped expand Monte Carlo simulation capabilities for HEC’s Water Analysis Tool (HEC-WAT), HEC-ResSim, and HEC-FIA, adding consideration of correlated sampling, data aggregation and different treatment of epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty. As part of his work on HEC’s River Analysis System (HEC-RAS) projects, Ben designed and implemented a new 2D flow model (RAS2D) that supports solution of the full shallow water equations as well as the simplified diffusion-wave equation over an unstructured computational grid. He has also implemented advanced matrix solvers to improve performance of the RMA2 and RMA11 finite element models. Ben holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and earned doctorate degrees in mathematics from Pennsylvania State University and in aerospace engineering from the University of California, Davis.