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.
CEE Faculty in the Built Environment
Negin Alemazkoor
T. Donna Chen
Dr. Chen joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Virginia in August 2015.
Andrés F. Clarens
Andrés Clarens is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UVA and Associate Director of the Pan-University Environmental Resilience Institute. His research is focused broadly on understanding anthropogenic carbon flows and the ways that CO2 is manipulated, reused, and sequestered in engineered systems.
Diana Franco Duran
Diana Franco Duran is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. She is the director of the Civil Engineering Undergraduate Program, and manages the Construction Engineering and Management (CEM) concentration.
Jose Pantaleon Gomez III
Jose Gomez was recently the Director of Research for the Virginia Transportation Research Council, the Virginia Department of Transportation’s research division until he retired in 2016. Highlights from his career include co-Principal Investigator on 16 external grants totaling over $5.4 million in research and co-author of 42 research reports.
Devin K. Harris
Professor Harris is chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Virginia. His research and teaching interests focus on large scale infrastructure systems with a primary focus on condition monitoring and system performance.
Arsalan Heydarian
Arsalan Heydarian is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering as well as the UVA Link Lab. His research broadly focuses on user-centered design, construction, and operation of intelligent infrastructure with the objective of enhancing their sustainability, adaptability, and resilience.
Lindsay Ivey Burden
Dr. Ivey Burden joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Virginia in January 2012. Her research and teaching interests include geotechnical engineering, foundations engineering, solid waste management, risk analysis in infrastructure systems, geotechnical earthquake engineering, and geophysical testing.
Leidy Klotz
James H. Lambert
Osman E. Ozbulut
Osman Ozbulut is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Virginia.
B. Brian Park
Brian Park is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Systems and Information Engineering at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on improving the efficiency of surface transportation systems via connected automated vehicle controls, traffic operations and management strategies.
Lisa Colosi Peterson
Lisa Colosi Peterson is a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and director of the UVA Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Lab.
Brian L. Smith, PE
Brian L. Smith, PE is a leader in advanced technology in surface transportation systems - specifically "connecting" the infrastructure to travelers to improve transportation safety and efficiency. His research has contributed to innovations such as mobile phone navigation systems and urban freeway management.
James A. Smith
James A. Smith is an environmental engineer holding the Henry L. Kinnier Chair of Civil Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UVA. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Civil Engineering from Virginia Tech in 1983 and 1984, and his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Princeton University in 1992.