Bringing resilience home: doctoral student Luciana Iannone Tarcha begins project to install flood sensors in São Paulo, Brazil


How far would you move for a job you’re passionate about? Doctoral student Luciana Iannone Tarcha moved fields–and continents–to study flooding, a major problem in her home state of São Paulo, Brazil. With her latest project, she hopes to bring the technology she’s working with back to where her career began.

Tarcha first went to college on a completely different path: dentistry. But after finishing the undergraduate program and several months of work, she still felt that something was missing. When deciding how to move forward, she looked back on other topics that had interested her in school. 

“I wasn’t completely satisfied,” Tarcha explained. “Dentistry was not something that gave me a lot of different choices or paths. And I knew I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life…but after you earn your money and have your family, it’s hard to go back to school.” After completing her postgrad dentistry work at the University of São Paulo, she moved on to São Paulo State University for a second undergraduate degree in civil engineering, followed by a Master’s in Urban and Regional Infrastructure.

While she enjoyed this change of focus from the start, once she started an internship designing stormwater systems, it was a perfect match. She began looking for PhD opportunities and research programs to continue in stormwater research, but had trouble finding a good fit close to home. “So then I started to look outside of Brazil, and I found Dr. Santiago and read some of his papers,” she said. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s exactly what I want to do.’”

Tarcha building the flood sensor in the College of Engineering’s fabrication lab on Monday, July 15, 2024.

After starting her PhD studies in Fall 2023, Tarcha worked on a number of projects in Dr. Félix Santiago-Collazo’s Compound Inundation Team for Resilient Applications (CITRA) lab, but it took some time to nail down what she was going to do for her dissertation. 

“I brought the idea to Dr. Santiago that I wanted to do something to help São Paulo city, which is where my family is from. I lived there for a long time,” Tarcha said about the project’s beginnings. “In São Paulo, we have a lot of flooding issues. Dr. Santiago told me about this low-cost flood sensor that was built and deployed in New York City.” 

The sensor measures distance and detects obstacles between itself and the ground, and has been used in the FloodNet NYC project to collect real-time flood data across the city. The team can use these sensors to detect water levels below each sensor. Tarcha and Santiago are working with Dr. José Rodolfo Scarati Martins, professor of civil engineering at the University of São Paulo, and manager of the existing network of flood sensors in São Paulo. These sensors are mainly found next to rivers and under bridges, detecting riverine flooding, but Tarcha hopes to place sensors around urban areas to detect where flooding occurs in streets and where drainage systems may be failing.

Tarcha and undergraduate intern Jonathan Warehime (College of Coastal Georgia) installed the test sensor on a stop sign at Driftmier Engineering Center on UGA’s campus on Thursday, July 18, 2024.

“I talked to [Dr. Martins] a year ago about what I was hoping to do, and asked for his help to collect data. We need people to support us,” Tarcha said. “He got very excited.”

This spring, she was awarded a Spencer Research Grant by UGA’s River Basin Center, which funded the purchase of four of the sensors. The Spencer Research Grant is an annual award given to graduate students studying freshwater resource management. It is named for the late John Kyle Spencer, an Odum School of Ecology graduate student who was passionate about freshwater research.

“The idea is that we’ll build the sensors with the community–so with high school students or university students–and do some social events to try to help them understand why it’s important,” she explained. “We want to engage the community and actually talk to them about the locations that they think need a sensor like this.” 

Tarcha with her first sensor, installed at Driftmier Engineering Center on July 18, 2024.

In coming to the University of Georgia for her doctoral degree, Tarcha has found a love for academia that she felt was missing in her previous studies. She plans to work to share her research with her home country. “In spring 2024, we had a major flood in the south of Brazil. It killed a lot of people, and communities were not prepared,” she said. “I always think that these kinds of problems need to start being resolved with research. Because if we don’t know why it’s happening, or we can’t predict it, then there’s nothing we can do.”

The torrential rains that hit southern Brazil in April 2024 caused flooding so persistent that parts of the Rio Grande floodplain remained underwater for over a month. Over 180 people were killed, and the floods are considered the worst to have hit the country in over 80 years.

“I can’t speak for other international students, but we come to another country and the resources are wonderful, but I’m very grateful for what I had in Brazil,” she explained. “So I have this opportunity here to learn, but I really want to give back to my community.”

And don’t worry–that dentistry degree isn’t going to waste. “My dentistry skills helped me build the circuit board and all the little parts that we had to solder,” Tarcha laughed. “Everything was so small and delicate.” 

Tarcha credited her dentistry skills with being able to work with the tiny parts of the sensor.

This July, the team installed one of the sensors on UGA’s campus for evaluation, and plans to travel to São Paulo in the summer of 2025 to build and install them with the community’s help. The lab hopes to apply for additional funding to purchase more sensors, building a network across São Paulo for additional data. 

Left to right: Luciana Iannone Tarcha, Jonathan Warehime, and Dr. Félix Santiago-Collazo pose next to their newly installed sensor on UGA’s campus on July 18, 2024.