BATON ROUGE, La. (Feb. 4, 2021) – Jason Curole, Ph.D., will be joining The Water Institute of the Gulf as the Director of Project Management on Feb. 22. Curole comes to the Institute after serving as a data scientist and business leader at GHD for three years and a project manager at Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority for five years.
Born and raised in New Orleans, Curole’s work includes managing large-scale Louisiana coastal restoration projects with total budgets ranging from $4 to $242 million, developing innovative and data-driven methods for evaluating the success of restoration projects, and extensive experience in managing projects from development to construction.
“Jason’s expertise in project management, his deep understanding of coastal Louisiana’s challenges, and his experience in large-scale data management makes him an amazing addition to the Institute,” said Justin Ehrenwerth, the Water Institute president and CEO. “We’re thrilled to welcome such an accomplished and collaborative coastal scientist to the Institute team.”
Curole received his bachelor’s and master’s degree in zoology from Louisiana State University and his Ph.D. in genetics from the University of New Hampshire. After his postdoctoral research at the University of Southern California, where his work concentrated on the collection and analysis of large data sets, Curole took a year sabbatical and traveled throughout southeast Asia before returning home to New Orleans.
“I had returned home and fell in love with the city all over again. I didn’t want to leave,” Curole said.
So, he took his experience in data analysis skills and went to work for the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority where initially he was responsible for the monitoring and adaptive management of large-scale coastal restoration projects. He then moved on to become a project manager where he served for five years.
In 2018, Curole joined GHD, a global professional services company specializing in engineering, construction, and architecture, and used his project management and data skills to spearhead novel methods for large-scale environmental data analysis for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and helped build a team dedicated to maritime and coastal work across the Gulf of Mexico coast.
“Joining the Institute feels like a really good fit for me. This is a job where I can clear-cut say you’re making the world a better place,” Curole said. “And it’s impacting a place that I know and love.”