Welcome from the Chair

Resilience.

It’s a concept we talk about a lot here in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, through our pedagogy and our research. How do we as engineers design, build, respond and rise to meet the global grand challenges of the 21st century?

This school year, our students, faculty and staff truly modeled resilience on a personal level while confronting a global pandemic unlike anything experienced in our lifetime.

Halfway through the spring semester, the entire school evacuated campus and moved to a completely remote learning environment within just a week, almost seamlessly. It’s truly remarkable what we were able to accomplish together with few complaints or technological hiccups.

I am so proud of our students, who rose to the occasion and adapted to this abrupt midsemester shift; the faculty who adjusted their lesson plans to provide continuity through remote classes; and the staff who worked over-time behind the scenes to take care of all the details that made this distance learning mode a reality. In addition, our faculty seized the opportunity to use their knowledge to help us better understand how this novel coronavirus is shaping our world. Several of our researchers rolled up their sleeves and got to work studying the effects of the pandemic through a civil and environmental engineering lens.

But this academic year wasn’t only defined by crisis. In the following pages, you’ll read about the remarkable achievements of our School’s students, faculty and alumni.

This year, for the first time in our 122-year history, the School’s undergraduate enrollment was 52 percent women. This is an exciting milestone toward gender parity in engineering, and we continue to strive to achieve more diversity and representation in all areas of CEE.

Thanks to the generosity of our alumni and supporters, we were able to double the number of endowed faculty positions in our School. This is a huge benefit and gives us a competitive edge to attract and retain top faculty.

This was also a year of great honors. Members of our CEE community were recognized in unprecedented numbers for their achievements by their peers in educational and professional organizations. And, for the 10th year in a row, our civil engineering programs were ranked in the Top 5 by U.S. News and World Report.

We are so proud of the work we’ve done, and we hope you’ll enjoy reading more about what we’ve been up to over the last year.

The only constant in life is change—and if we’ve learned anything this year, it’s that our Civil and Environmental Engineering students are prepared to lead us into the future, whatever challenges it may bring.

Sincerely,