Built Environment
Civil and environmental engineers design, build, and maintain the built environment, i.e., the roads, buildings, drinking water facilities, and other infrastructure systems that serve society.
Our department’s research is focused on increasing the equity, durability, and resiliency of this built environment. Equity requires that everything civil and environmental engineers build, operate, and maintain serve human wellbeing to consider the varying needs of different groups within our society, including working to identify and work toward righting historical inequalities.
Durability is needed to ensure that infrastructure meets its intended purpose over its expected service life. Resilience is needed to mitigate the impacts of climate change and natural disasters, allowing communities to quickly recover from extreme events and adapt to new conditions. This includes transportation engineers finding new ways to reconnect a community divided by a highway, structural engineers implementing new monitoring systems to understand health of a built system, and environmental engineers bringing clean drinking water to a community that lacks access to this basic human need.