Willington Rentería, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the USC Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. His research sits at the intersection of coastal engineering and artificial intelligence, focusing on solving complex inverse problems in nearshore environments.
Willington developed CelerisAI, a differentiable solver that integrates traditional coastal hydrodynamics with deep learning workflows. By embedding physical laws (such as the Boussinesq equations) directly into the neural network’s learning process, his models provide physically consistent bathymetric estimates even with sparse data. Moreover, he also developed the Differentiable Physics-Based Inversion, a method that leverages automatic differentiation (AD) for gradient-based data optimization, allowing for the real-time correction of underwater topography through the assimilation of sea-surface data.
Originally from Ecuador, Willington served as the head of the Oceanography department and the tsunami warning center at the Oceanographic Institute of the Navy. He holds a Master’s degree in Oceanography from Texas A&M University and is dedicated to developing «digital twins» of the nearshore environment to enhance coastal hazard monitoring and management.
Willington Rentería 