About Ben Nielsen

Ben Nielsen is a professional licensed engineer with McLaughlin Whitewater Design Group in Denver, Colorado. His river restoration and wave designs include the Ebensee Surf Wave (Austria), Neckarwelle (Stuttgart), River Run Park (Denver Surf Wave), Boise River Park, and Chattahoochee River Restoration in Columbus Georgia. While attending Cal Poly, where he received a degree in civil engineering, he fell in love with surfing the powerful, empty lineups of Central California. With Ben’s passion for rivers and surfing combined with expertise in hydraulics and fluid dynamics he is advancing river wave design to bring land locked surfers, like him, the stoke of riding waves. When not designing waves or surfing, he is probably in his shaping bay building surf boards for both the ocean and river. He sits on the Board for the Colorado River Surfing Association. Ben has presented at many U.S. and international conferences on various topics related to river recreation design. Most recently, he presented design strategies for integrated recreation and fish passage projects at the 2013 International Fish Passage Conference, design of surf waves in natural river systems at the 2014 Forum Flusswellen in Munich, and the future of surf wave design at the 2016 Forum Flusswellen in Nuremberg.