C E E AT I L L I N O I S
C E E AT I L L I N O I S
The American Society of Civil Engineers defines sustainability as maintaining and improving society’s “quality of life indefinitely, without degrading … natural, economic, and social resources.” The interdisciplinary Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure Systems (SRIS) program prepares civil and environmental engineering students to be leaders in holistically planning, designing and managing sustainable and resilient infrastructure systems and their interactions. Graduates of the SRIS program join a new generation of civil and environmental engineers who have the broad vision to holistically consider the environmental, economic and social impact of their work on local, regional and global systems. For example, students learn to use system-level approaches to achieve sustainable use of material and resources in the construction of engineered systems and to balance the short-term costs of facility development with the need to integrate such facilities within an infrastructure system that is resilient to natural and human-made disasters.
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The SRIS program offers M.S. and Ph.D. degrees, as well as undergraduate primary and secondary concentrations.
Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure Systems Program
cee.illinois.edu/SRIS
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Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering College of Engineering University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Newmark Civil Engineering Laboratory, MC-250 205 N. Mathews Ave. Urbana, Illinois 61801 217-333-8038 / FAX: 217-333-9464 civil@illinois.edu cee.illinois.edu
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering College of Engineering University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
C E E AT I L L I N O I S
SRIS Program Faculty
Assoc. Professor Ximing Cai
Faculty in the Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure Systems program represent the spectrum of traditional CEE sub-disciplines. They lead research projects that cut across traditional boundaries among engineering disciplines and the physical and social sciences. They collaborate with engineers and scientists from around the world.
Global Leaders in Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure Systems The Global Leaders in Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure Systems program provides background on global issues affecting CEE infrastructure systems and prepares students interested in professional practice or research in the international arena. Students participate in the program during their graduate studies and earn the Global Leaders designation along with their M.S. degrees. Participants in this program must complete the normal requirements of the SRIS program, as well as additional global requirements, including: • • •
An international SRIS-related project, involving at least one international trip. One national trip to compare their international experience with sustainability and resilience issues in the U.S. One-credit CEE 597 Independent Study, in which students discuss connections among the Global Leaders projects and trips and each student prepares a publication based on his or her findings from the above experiences.
cee.illinois.edu/SRIS/globalleaders
Research interests of the SRIS faculty include: • Planning and management of sustainable and resilient transportation systems • Renewable energy supply and logistics • Reliable network design under the risk of service disruptions • Sustainable urban underground structures development • Earthquake resiliency and interaction of above- and below-ground urban infrastructure • Real-time monitoring, optimization and control of infrastructure systems • Multiscale data and model synthesis for improved decision support • Green infrastructure design to meet social, economic and environmental objectives • Resilience and sustainability modeling of interdependent infrastructural systems • Energy-water-environment nexus analysis and modeling • Strategic infrastructure planning under climate change • Mobile sensing, inverse modeling and data assimilation • Risk-informed management and post-disaster operations of lifeline networks • Reliability analysis of sequential failures in structures for risk-informed design and maintenance • Integrated assessment of environmental and socioeconomic impacts of infrastructural expansion
Professor Youssef Hashash
—Amr S. Elnashai CEE Professor and Head
Professor Barbara Minsker
Assoc. Professor Yanfeng Ouyang
SRIS Program Curriculum
Assoc. Professor Junho Song
cee.illinois.edu/SRIS/MS-PhD
Photos, top to bottom: Professor Barbara Minsker, center, and CEE student Maria Jones learn about water and sanitation problems in a village near Chennai, India. CEE student Yao Hu gets a first-hand look at the massive water infrastructure being built in northwest China to address water shortages.
cee.illinois.edu/SRIS
“To solve real-world problems, we need multidisciplinary information.” —Associate Professor Ximing Cai Environmental Hydrology and Hydraulic Engineering SRIS program faculty member
cee.illinois.edu/SRIS/faculty
Students in this program not only acquire a broad range of knowledge from the traditional civil and environmental engineering areas but also learn holistic systems analysis tools such as optimization and decision support, probability and statistics, and environmental and natural resources economics, often by taking advanced courses outside of CEE. Our graduates are especially well-suited for work in government agencies and laboratories, consulting engineering firms and other industry, sustainability advocacy organizations, as well as academic institutions.
“We are redefining the Illinois educational experience and uniquely branding our students as not only good engineers with rigorous training and problem-solving skills, but also as thinkers, integrators, communicators, cultural and technical translators, and therefore leaders.”
Assistant Professor Dan Work
“The systems perspective is critical to solving today’s engineering problems.”
—Professor Barbara Minsker Environmental Engineering and Sciences SRIS program faculty member
“Sustainable development meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” —The Brundtland Commission