On a late summer afternoon off the North Carolina coast, a young graduate student in civil engineering waded into a scary first-person experiment. Tuba Ozkan-Haller was the daughter of an admiral in the Turkish navy, but despite that oceanic upbringing, “I was always very tentative and extremely afraid of the water,” she says. “My poor dad was always frustrated.” As she grew up she found that the more she learned about the ocean, the less afraid she was. “I felt like I had more control.” On this partly cloudy afternoon she stepped into the surf—the waves weren’t very ... Read More
