When Douglas L. Inman began his career as a coastal scientist in the 1950s, little was known about the coastal region where water, land and air come together, which geologists call the nearshore. It was obvious that beaches differed from place to place, but geologists struggled to do much more than classify them according to their shapes. Little was known about the direct relationships among waves, currents and the movement of coastal sediments like sand.

Dr. Inman, who died at 95 on Feb. 11 in the La Jolla area of San Diego, helped change all that. At the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla and its parent institution, the University of California, San Diego, he led research that opened the eyes of science to the processes that shape the beach.

His death was confirmed by the university.

Among other things, early in his career Dr. Inman integrated studies of coastal change with the theory of plate tectonics — the idea, new at the time, that the Earth’s crust comprises a number of moving plates. He was a leading theorist of the idea that coasts comprise “littoral cells” — that every stretch of coast had a source of sand, something to move it and a sink where this sediment ends up. (In California, the sources are typically rivers that carry sediment to the coast, the transport mechanisms are currents that carry sediment along it, and the sinks are the deep submarine canyons that cut almost to shore through the region’s narrow continental shelf.)

Dr. Inman trained generations of coastal scientists who, building on his insights, created a large and influential body of coastal research and themselves trained still other scientists, who refer to themselves as Dr. Inman’s descendants.