Dr. Sou received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She continued to pursue her Ph.D. at Cornell University and received her Ph.D. in Environmental Fluid Mechanics from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University with a minor area in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in 2006. Upon graduating from Cornell University, she worked as a Post-doctoral Research Associate in the Civil and Construction Engineering Department at the Oregon State University. In 2008, she accepted an offer from the University of Hawaii at Manoa as a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. In 2011, she received the National Research Council Research Associateship award from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and joined the Seafloor Sciences Branch research group at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in the Stennis Space Center.

Her research interests relate to applying fluid mechanics theories and fluid measurement techniques such as tomographic particle image velocimetry (PIV) and stereo PIV to the study of geophysical flows including coastal hydrodynamics, mechanics of sediment suspension and transport, wave-wave and wave-structure interaction, and turbulent mixing processes in the coastal environments.

• Surf and swash zone hydrodynamics

• Quantitative imaging-based flow measurement techniques

• Sediment transport

• Tsunami characteristics

• Wave-wave and wave-structure interaction

• Coastal engineering

• Mixing and transport in the environments

• Analysis of turbulence