Last April, Ivor van Heerden, an internationally known hurricane expert, was told he was losing his job at Louisiana State University. He and other experts said it was because of his outspoken criticism of the federal government’s flood protection of New Orleans; the university would not comment.

Now van Heerden, former deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center, is suing to get his job back. His lawyers filed a lawsuit in Louisiana state court on Wednesday, charging harassment and wrongful termination.

Van Heerden joined LSU in 1992 and rose to prominence as an expert on storms and the region, becoming a research professor and director of the Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes.

In 2005, he sounded alarms about the potentially devastating impact of a major storm on New Orleans despite 40 years of hurricane protection efforts.

After Hurricane Katrina, he criticized the Army Corps of Engineers on TV and in print, arguing that engineering mistakes had caused breaches in the hurricane protection system that led to most of the death and destruction in New Orleans.

State officials named him to lead Team Louisiana, an investigation into the causes of the damage from the storm. At the university, however, van Heerden’s growing profile as an anti-government gadfly was seen as a problem. One university official sent him an e-mail message, obtained by The New York Times, saying that he needed to help the state’s recovery, not point blame.

He said he was told by administrators that his verbal barbs against the government would lead to cuts in aid for LSU, and the university criticized him for speaking about levees without having engineering training. Last April, he was told that his contract, ending in May 2010, would not be renewed.

In his court filing, he described “a multi-year campaign of retaliation,” and said LSU had “placed the bureaucratic interests of university officials above the health and safety of the millions of people who live in the path of the hurricanes that threaten the Gulf Coast every year.”