Two New Faculty Join CEE

The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering is very proud to welcome two new Assistant Professor Faculty this Fall 2016! 

Dr. Erica Marie Hartmann is an environmental microbiologist interested in the interaction between human-made chemicals and microbes. She was the first PhD graduate of the interdisciplinary Biological Design program at Arizona State University where she worked with environmental engineers to develop molecular methods to detect microbes in food, soil, and water samples. From there, she was awarded a Fulbright to study microbes that degrade the toxic, carcinogenic pollutants known as dioxins in France at the Commission for Atomic Energy. She began leading studies on the effects of antimicrobial chemicals on the microbes found in indoor dust at the Biology and the Built Environment Center at the University of Oregon and since Sept. 2016 is continuing that work as an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University. 

Dr. James Hambleton, is a geotechnical engineer and is originally from the Midwest, holding B.C.E., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of Minnesota, and he joins the Department after six years at The University of Newcastle, Australia, where he worked first as a post-doctoral researcher and then as a Senior Lecturer in the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Geotechnical Science and Engineering. Professor Hambleton’s main research interests are in computational plasticity, geotechnical analysis, contact mechanics, soil-machine interaction, and the analysis of problems involving unsteady plastic flow. A major focal point of his work over the coming years is to advance the understanding of how soils are moved and shaped through interaction with man-made objects and machinery. He has received various awards and distinctions, including most recently the prestigious ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, and he is a member of the editorial boards of Computers and Geotechnics and Canadian Geotechnical Journal.