Equipping Students for the Future of the Profession
While we're equipping our students with the knowledge and tools that can apply to the CEE profession today, our real goal is to give students the advanced tools required to address where we the practice is headed in the coming decades. One of the real advantages for students at a cutting-edge research university like Stanford is that the advancements developed in our labs "trickle-down" and becomes quickly incorporated into the curriculum.
Sustainability - A Core Value
One of the ways in which we are responding to our vision of the future of the profession is that we have made sustainability a core value informing our curriculum and research. Civil engineers still create, manage, maintain, and renew society's infrastructure in ways that provide an appropriate quality of life for all, and increasingly we must also protect, nurture, or renew our fragile environment and natural resources.
A significant change in the past several decades is that our social contract now must address a common goal of engineering for a sustainable future. The biggest opportunity we face in addressing this challenge is to more fully merge the disciplines of Civil Engineering and Environmental Engineering with the objective of making all of us 'Sustainable Civil Engineers'.
CEE's Interdependent Disciplines
Collaboration among a broad set of disciplines is not only desireable, but increasingly becomes mandatory when facing the forthcoming economic and ecological challenges. Our department is naturally situated for the integration of many synergistic disciplines and as we move forward, the curriculum and our research is stressing collaborative efforts between these disciplines.
To meet the goals of our sustainability strategy, disciplines within the Built Environment programs need to draw upon the expertise developed in our Natural Environment programs. Together students, faculty and researchers are developing innovative materials, building methods and designs.
CEE will be housed in the near future in the new Environmental and Energy Building currently under construction. One of the design goals of this new facility was to put together students, faculty and researchers together in a single facility, rather than in separate buildings as we are now. Collaboration, whether casual interactions or formal, project-based ones, will be greatly enhanced in this new environment, and aid us in increasing the influences between disciplines.
Environment & Energy Building - Section South