Sara Santamaria-Aguilar is a research assistant professor of coastal risks and engineering in the UCF Department of Civil, Environmental and Construction Engineering and is a member of the National Center for Integrated Coastal Research. Her research focuses on coastal flood hazards, with an emphasis on compound flooding and the interactions between different flood drivers. She develops numerical and statistical approaches to better understand flood processes and their variability, with the goal of improving flood hazard assessments, advancing actionable science, and providing information that supports decision-making and the development of effective and flexible climate adaptation strategies.

Aguilar holds a degree in oceanography from the University of Vigo, Spain, and a master’s degree in integrated coastal zone management from the University of Cantabria, Spain. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Kiel, Germany, in 2021, where her research focused on the variability and long-term changes of extreme water levels, including storm tides and their underlying drivers. Following her Ph.D., she continued at the University of Kiel as a postdoctoral researcher, assessing coastal flooding in South Africa as part of CASISAC (“Changes in the Agulhas System and its Impacts on Southern African Coasts”), a project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.