The horrifying tsunami that struck Southeast Asia in 2004 changed a lot of things for the engineers who study those natural disasters. "Before 2004, tsunami research was really a niche area," says civil engineering Professor Dan Cox, director of the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory (HWRL) at Oregon State University. HWRL is part of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) program. Creative Commons license: CC0 1.0 Universal