School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Creation and operation of infrastructure to meet expanding societal and climate needs is a fundamental challenge for humanity. The human ecosystem exists at the intersection of the built and natural environments, cyber-infrastructure and human wants and needs. CEEs Strategic Plan calls for investments in people, program, infrastructure, and collaborations with Cornell Tech to drive a substantial evolution in the technology that underpins cyber-physical (social) systems. These investments will allow CEE and Cornell Tech to lead research centered on inventing and developing technologies that are effective at the large scales defined by the need. The ability to control these large cyber-physical(social) systems will allow CEE to build upon existing strengths in first principles-based engineering, as well as to grow strength in emergent human choice centered domains (i.e., human in the loop infrastructure).

Frontier engineering research leading to expanded opportunities to decarbonize the economy, including renewable energy systems and their integration in infrastructure and buildings to transition humanity to a low carbon future is a second priority direction for CEE. Energy and materials research that drive the majority of current efforts towards a low carbon future must be integrated with the development of robust, sustainable and climate resilient infrastructures and the maintenance of healthy natural environments, areas of historical strength in CEE. 10 The challenge of implementing these innovations at scale pose additional opportunities for CEE to contribute impactful work that benefits society.

The critical roles water quality and availability play in society, including public health, align this CEE priority with the global grand challenge of providing abundant and safe water supplies to a rapidly growing global population. Increasing stress on water resources brought about by climate change, pollution, and energy production adds urgency to the need for solutions that are cost-effective and scalable. CEE’s strategic plan aims to activate current and new research programs focused on climate impacts, emergent pollution, water transport and dynamic pricing, and their important linkages to engineering smart cities and enabling urban-rural resilience.

Evolution of CEE’s educational programs to prepare students able to apply engineering first principles to solve industry and society’s grandest challenges in the emerging areas summarized in Priorities 1-3 is among the highest priorities for CEE. In that vein, CEE is creating new and expanding existing courses in sensors for use across the natural and built environment, data analytics, systems modeling, and engineering smart cities. We envision expanding these offerings with new courses in risk analysis as well. The school has also created a new specialization in energy and sustainability in the Master of Engineering program, for which many of the courses are used to enrich the offerings available to our undergraduates. We envision evolving these offerings over time as well. CEE is in the process of re-imagining its education programs in geotechnical engineering by linking them with programming in energy and the environment. CEE will continue to make strategic investments in recruiting faculty including practitioners who can elevate the undergraduate learning experiences by creating impactful project teams and training them to tackle emerging and intersectional challenges in infrastructure, water, and energy.

A unique strength of CEE is its deep commitment to professional education. The school has traditionally used in-person instruction as the primary mode of delivering professional training. A strategic priority for CEE is to leverage this success to develop programs suitable for educating new types of students, where they work and live. This approach will enable CEE to break barriers associated with geographical locations to truly create a diverse and inclusive learning environment. To this end, the school recently launched an on-line Master of Engineering program in Engineering Management and admitted its first cohort of online students in the Fall of 2020. We envision evolving the on-line offerings over the next several years to ensure that the content and quality meet the same standards of excellence CEE has achieved in its in-person courses. Best practices developed in the process will be used to create opportunities for on-line professional education in other areas, including engineering smart cities and possibly in energy and water possibly linked to a program in the environment/sustainability.

CEE’s strategic plan calls for the recruitment of a diverse student body and faculty to catalyze efforts in support of this priority. The impacts of success are far reaching and important. It is clear, for instance, that the services provided by civil and environmental engineers are closely connected to equity. As an example, the interstate highway system brought economic progress, but it often accelerated inequities. As a second example truck pollution disproportionately impacts low-income communities. Hence, actions by civil and environmental engineers can lead to opportunities that help society progress with respect to these issues or could hamper that progress. The school is committed to refining its course offerings to help students understand the connections between the application of the skills they are learning and the resultant and often varied impacts these actions can have on the diversity of communities 11 in the United States. We believe that educating students able to articulate these impacts will lead to well-rounded CEE graduates who can lead the profession.