The Fellowship will pioneer the concept of integrated numerical modelling for coastal defence design by combining two different classes of numerical model for wave transformation in the coastal zone and wave-structure interaction.This will enable simultaneous investigation of those physical processes that act at very different spatial scales and influence wave propagation and the performance of coastal structures during extreme storms and flooding. The Fellowship is motivated by the pressing need for the coastal research community to provide for advanced design tools that can help designers and coastal communities in optimizing the resources needed for designing, building and maintaining coastal defences.The Fellow will lead a research team that will develop these tools using an open source platform. A modular approach will be pursued so that at the end of each task of the project a self-standing, well-tested numerical tool can be delivered. The research will then focus on the most challenging task: interfacing a coastal model with one model able to investigate the local-scale processes that act in the near field of coastal structures and thereby to determine their performance. Additionally, a large-scale wave generation and a surge models will be interface with the coastal model. This integrated model will be first built for one-dimensional wave propagation and therefore the fully two-dimensional case. This model will have the remarkable capability of describing the features of the wave propagation and describe the three-dimensional nature of the flow in the near field of structures of interest. In order to be efficient and to benefit coastal designers, this interfacing should be possible both for non-breaking waves and breaking wave conditions. This is particularly challenging since it will require that the two-dimensional coastal model be equipped with an accurate sub-model to describe the turbulence transport due to wave breaking. The research team will also establish a methodology able to measure the uncertainty of the prediction of the numerical model at hand.The research objectives will be measured by the accuracy of the simulations of selected test cases found in literature. The project will culminate in the analysis of a test case, involving a realistic scenario of coastal flooding in the presence of defence structures, which will measure the benefits of the use of an integrated modelling approach with respect to the state of the art in coastal design.