Making Tangible Change in the World: Civil & Environmental Engineers

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• published: 11 Feb 2014
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Civil and Environmental Engineers have always tackled monumental problems, visualized the big picture, and developed innovative solutions to complex problems that have a major impact on people. Doug Adams, Chairman of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Vanderbilt University School of Engineering (www.cee.vanderbilt.edu), describes the department's undergraduate and graduate studies, and how the department is doing world-class research and creating a life-sustaining legacy for future generations. The department's approach, which is unusual for engineering schools and distinctive at Vanderbilt, is to integrate educational experiences across academic lines at both undergraduate and graduate levels. This tailored, multidisciplinary experience, on top of of a strong engineering fundamentals foundation, gives students a clear competitive advantage in the marketplace, irrespective of professional goals. The faculty in Civil and Environmental Engineering, who teach students and guide research, include world leaders in their respective fields. The department's clear and focused goal is to prepare students beyond technical proficiency -- as leaders in developing innovative solutions to the complex problems that have a major impact on people's lives. The Civil and Environmental Engineering department is recognized as an international research leader in the areas of multi-scale systems and structures reliability and risk, nuclear waste management, and leaching assessment approaches for environmental decision making. Research emphasizes understanding and improving the performance, including assessment of reliability and risk for advanced materials, complex structures, environmental systems and transportation systems. For more information on Undergraduate studies at Vanderbilt: http://engineering.vanderbilt.edu/cee/Undergraduate/index.php For more information on Graduate studies in Civil Engineering and Environmental at Vanderbilt: http://engineering.vanderbilt.edu/cee/GraduateStudy/index.php Research Areas of Expertise include: Risk and Reliability Engineering and Management Materials and structures; durability, fatigue and fracture Structural health monitoring and damage detection Large complex systems, decision-making under uncertainty, optimization Model uncertainty: verification, validation and extrapolation Enterprise (all hazards) risk management Energy and Environment Nuclear environmental systems Leaching processes and assessment Contaminated site restoration & waste management systems design Molecular and multi-scale contaminant fate and transport Environmental risk assessment, management and communication Water quality & resources Multi-Scale Structural Mechanics and Advanced Materials Multi-scale and multi-physics computational modeling of materials, structures and civil infrastructure systems Multi-scale characterization of durability of cement-based materials Risk and reliability analysis of composite systems Experimental impact, damage, and fracture behavior of nanocomposites Transportation Systems Multi-modal freight transportation Environmental footprints Routing and logistics Hazardous materials transport To learn more about Vanderbilt, visit http://www.vanderbilt.edu.