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Environmental Engineering
Creating and ensuring the world has clean and healthy environments including is one of the greatest challenges of our time. More than 5 million children under the age of five die every year due to the lack of clean water and basic sanitation. Revolutionary strategies are needed to engineer a symbiotic design to natural and manmade environments, with new technologies being needed to address the world’s increasing challenges to establish environmental health. Civil and Environmental Engineers take vital leadership roles both technically and as trusted advisors and policy makers.
As a student of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University who wants to focus on environmental engineering, you will learn to tackle interconnected challenges in water, energy, waste, air pollution, and related fields, all in the context of a changing planet. This technical area at Northeastern University covers a wide range of technologies and design solutions for natural systems, from the molecular scale to global climate change. Our faculty work on creating hardware and software tools to better monitor, predict, and mitigate environmental pollution and create clean environments. Areas of study include impact of climate change, hydrologic modeling and dynamic simulation, coastal processes and engineering, remote sensing of the environment, biotechnology and microbial ecology, advanced water treatment processes, water-energy nexus, industrial ecology and techno-economic assessment, resource recovery, development of environmental remediation techniques, and sensing of organic and inorganic pollutants in the environment.
Selected Research Projects - Environmental | ||
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Project | Funding Agency | Faculty |
Puerto Rico Testsite for Exploring Contamination Threats (PRoTECT) | National Institute of Health | Alshawabkeh, Sheahan |
Terrestrial Hydrology, Decomposing the Water Storage Signal from Basins in Varied Climate Settings with Remote Sensing and Modeling | National Aeronautics and Space Administration | Beighley |
Ethics Education in Life Cycle Design, Engineering, and Management | National Science Foundation | Eckelman |
Designing and Integrating Life Cycle Assessment Methods for Nanomanufacturing Scale-up | National Science Foundation | Eckelman |
Quantitative Thermodynamic Exposure Assessment (Q-TEA) Supporting Resilient Contaminated Sediment Site Restoration | Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (Department of Defense) | Fernandez |
Expeditions in Computing: Understanding Climate Change: A Data-driven Approach | National Science Foundation | Ganguly |
Water scarcity/temperature in the US with climate/population change | Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (Department of Energy) | Ganguly |
Disaster Resilience of Buildings, Infrastructure, and Communities | National Institute of Standards and Technology | Ganguly, Hajjar |
Investigate Mechanisms For Optimization And Design Of Side-Stream EBPR Process As A Sustainable Approach For Achieving Stable And Efficient P Removal | Water Environment Research Foundation | Onnis-Hayden |
Muddy River Water Quality | Brookline, Boston, State of MA | Wei |
CAREER: Quantum Dot Degradation in Aquatic Environments | National Science Foundation | Larese-Casanova |
Insights to Selenium Cycling and Remediation Revealed by Stable Oxygen Isotopes | National Science Foundation | Larese-Casanova, Onnis-Hayden |
How does the gastrovascular system in perforate and imperforate corals affect physiological response to environmental stress? | National Science Foundation | Patterson |
Associated Faculty & Staff
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- George A. Snell Professor of Engineering, Civil and Environmental EngineeringAssociate Dean for ResearchDirector, PROTECT Superfund Research Center
Geoenvironmental engineering, soil and groundwater remediation; electrokinetic and electrochemical processes; contaminant fate and transport environmental restoration -
- Professor, Marine and Environmental SciencesAffiliated Faculty, BioengineeringAffiliated Faculty, Civil and Environmental EngineeringAffiliated Faculty, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Development of underwater robots for civil infrastructure and explosive sensing; neurophysiology and behavior biomimetics -
- Associate Professor & Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies, Civil and Environmental EngineeringAffiliated Faculty, Marine and Environmental Sciences
Hydrologic and hydraulic modeling; remote sensing of the hydrologic cycle; hydrologic impacts of climate and/or land use change; flood hazard and risk assessment -
- Professor, Civil and Environmental EngineeringInterdisciplinary with, Marine and Environmental Sciences
Coastal engineering and science, particularly in the development and application of state-of-the-art numerical models to address coastal resiliency and sustainability. -
- Associate Professor and Associate Chair For Research, Civil and Environmental EngineeringAffiliated Faculty, Chemical EngineeringAffiliated Faculty, Marine and Environmental SciencesAffiliated Faculty, School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs
Environmental engineering and sustainability; life cycle assessment; energy efficiency and emissions modeling; environmental assessment of bio and nanomaterials; material and energy use in urban buildings and infrastructure -
- Assistant Professor, Civil and Environmental EngineeringInterdisciplinary with, Marine and Environmental Sciences
Environmental organic chemistry; passive sampling methods for organic contaminants in water and sediments; transport, transformation, and biological exchange of organic contaminants in the environment -
- Founding Director, Global Resilience InstituteProfessor, Political ScienceAffiliated Faculty, Civil and Environmental Engineering
critical infrastructure resilience; public policy -
- Professor, Civil and Environmental EngineeringProfessor (by courtesy), Khoury College of Computer SciencesProfessor (by courtesy), Marine and Environmental ScienceProfessor (by courtesy), Political ScienceProfessor (by courtesy), School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs
Water & Climate Science, Data & Network Science, and Infrastructure Resilience -
- Associate Professor, College of ScienceAffiliated Faculty, Civil and Environmental Engineering
statistical and dynamical modeling; theoretical ecology -
- Affiliated Faculty, Civil & Environmental EngineeringProfessor, Marine and Environmental Sciences
Environmental Science and Policy, Fisheries, Ecological Economics -
- Affiliated Faculty, Civil & Environmental EngineeringProfessor, Marine and Environmental SciencesInterdisciplinary with, School for Public Policy and Urban Affairs
Ecological forecasting and resilience of coastal environments -
- Affiliated Faculty, Civil & Environmental EngineeringAssociate Professor, Marine and Environmental Sciences
Marine Community Ecology and Biodiversity -
- Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental EngineeringAffiliated Faculty, Marine and Environmental Sciences
Environmental chemistry and mineralogy; transformation and remediation of water pollutants; nanomaterial sorbents for water treatment -
- Assistant Professor, Civil & Environmental EngineeringInterdisciplinary with, Marine and Environmental SciencesAffiliated Faculty, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Biogeochemistry of natural and engineered systems; in-situ sensors and instrumentation for high-resolution process characterization; remediation and sustainability in natural and built coastal environments; sensor-driven closed-loop controls for resource optimization in engineered systems; signal processing and machine learning, embedded systems, and sensor networks -
- Assistant Professor, Marine and Environmental SciencesInterdisciplinary with, Civil and Environmental Engineering
sedimentary records of environmental change, paleoclimate and climate change, rivers and fluvial processes, hydroclimatic extremes -
- Professor Emeritus, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Diffuse (Nonpoint) Pollution, Water Quality Management, Total Maximum Daily Loads, Restoration, Socio-economic Issues of Water Quality Abatement -
- Associate Teaching Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Biological treatment processes; ecotoxicology and toxicity assessment; microbial population dynamics and ecology in engineered biological systems -
- Professor, Marine and Environmental SciencesInterdisciplinary with, Civil and Environmental EngineeringAssociate Dean for Research and Graduate Affairs, College of ScienceChief Technology Officer, Global Resilience Institute
Development of autonomous underwater robots for civil infrastructure and marine sensing; decision support tools for gray/green infrastructure like tide gates; environmental fluid mechanics; biomechanics and mass transfer in living systems -
- Assistant Professor, Civil and Environmental EngineeringAffiliated Faculty, Marine and Environmental Sciences
Microbial ecology and physiology, drinking water treatment and distribution, wastewater treatment, public health microbiology, molecular microbiology, 'omics analyses -
- Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Office of the DeanProfessor, Civil and Environmental EngineeringTraining Core Leader, PROTECT Center
Soft ground engineering, coastal adaptation, education and training for engineers and scientists -
- Affiliated Faculty, Civil and Environmental EngineeringDean’s Professor of Sustainability Science and Policy and Director, School for Public Policy and Urban Affairs
Renewable energy transformation, reducing fossil fuel reliance, energy resilience, energy democracy, climate engineering, gender & energy, integrating social justice with climate and energy innovations -
- Associate Professor, Marine and Environmental SciencesInterdisciplinary with, Civil and Environmental EngineeringInterdisciplinary with, Chemistry and Chemical Biology
environmental chemistry; geochemistry; the carbon cycle; freshwater, coastal and ocean biogeochemistry; feedbacks between natural biogeochemical cycles and climate change; permafrost; black carbon; aquatic microplastics -
- Professor and Chair, Marine and Environmental SciencesAffiliated Faculty, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Evolutionary and community ecology; coastal sustainability -
- Professor Emeritus, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Ozonation & Chlorination of Water, Advanced Oxidation Processes, Chemical Precipitation & Coagulation, Kinetics & Mechanism of Chemical Processes