What We Research

Cities accommodate more than 50 percent of the world’s population, and urban areas are projected to expand at a rapid pace.

Today’s cities inflict a mostly adverse impact on our natural environment, lack resilience to cope with natural disasters, and provide a disparate quality of life and quality of services to their populations. Our challenge is to re-imagine the design and operation of future urban environments to improve sustainability, resiliency, and urban quality of life.

Across these disciplines, we integrate analytical, experimental, and computational methods with analysis of large urban data sets to understand and predict urban phenomena, and promote social, environmental, and economic sustainability of the cities of the future.

The department’s energy research covers a range of topics to address this challenge, including resource availability of renewable energies, matching supply with instantaneous demand, analysis of the effects of a variety of energy technologies, energy flow in cities, and the design and operation of zero-energy buildings.

Across these topics, we explore the design and application of novel sensor technologies, analysis tools for large data sets, and data-driven and physics-based computational modeling, considering, for example, renewable power resources, transmission load flows, or building energy consumption.

In the design phase, our research develops innovative technologies that enhance performance of systems during extreme events such as earthquakes, next-generation smart grids for renewable energy distribution, new materials with enhanced durability and reduced life-cycle impacts, and decentralized technologies for water treatment. In the project delivery phase, we have pioneered virtual design and construction techniques to effectively deliver complex projects and study innovative financing mechanisms to fund mega-projects. In the project use phase, we research how social systems interact with physical systems most effectively and develop new technologies such as wireless sensing systems to monitor the health and performance of our infrastructure.

Our innovations are not merely academic. Through close partnerships with industry, utilities, nonprofits, and governmental agencies, our research insights and the technologies we devise are frequently applied in practice.

Another research focus characterizes exposure to pathogens in low-income countries and tests technological, behavioral, and institutional strategies to mitigate this exposure. Research also targets how people interact with physical and digital environments in buildings, with the goal of designing spaces that promote occupant wellbeing, including a feeling of belonging and the reduction of stress. Throughout, we seek not just to characterize risk but to design new technologies that improve public health and wellbeing.

The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering is a world leader in research and teaching on the fate and transport of contaminants in natural waters, including in groundwater and in reservoirs, rivers, lakes, and the coastal ocean. We focus on understanding how chemicals and pathogens behave in urban and natural waters and how to develop treatment systems to minimize the impacts of pollutants in the environment. Much of our work is on water reuse and energy-efficient water purification and wastewater treatment.

We are also world leaders in analysis and simulation of surface and groundwater flows, with an emphasis on coastal regions, which are particularly vulnerable in the face of a changing climate and the rise of coastal megacities. Understanding hydrology and the impact of climate on existing and future water resources, with an emphasis on ensuring access to water and sanitation in less industrialized economies, is another focus of our faculty.