Jurjen Battjes
Jurjen Anno Battjes (born 22 February 1939 in Winschoten, Netherlands) is a Dutch civil engineer and expert in fluid dynamics. He was a professor of fluid dynamics at Delft University of Technology until he retired in 2004.
Battjes earned his MSc in civil engineering from Delft in 1962 and his PhD there in 1974, with a thesis on the effects of wind-generated waves on coastal water and run-up. He spent four years as an assistant professor at the University of Florida’s Laboratory of Coastal Engineering before becoming a professor at Delft in the late 1960s, where he held the chair of fluid dynamics.
In October 2005, Battjes helped analyze the causes of the levee failures in Greater New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina as a member of an External Review Panel; he was the only non-American on the panel. He was elected to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1975 and received the International Coastal Engineering Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1990. In 2009 he was elected as a foreign member of the United States National Academy of Engineering for his leadership, research, and teaching in coastal engineering and storm protection.
His book Unsteady flows in open channels, co-authored with Robert Jan Labeur, was named an outstanding academic title by Choice magazine in 2017.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 16:59 (CET).