Academics
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Prospective Students
Prospective Graduate Students

The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering offers a tremendous amount of academic, social, and cultural extracurricular activities that enrich learning experiences. Here is a warm welcome from the faculty and staff for prospective students at the 2021 Graduate Student Open House. It also includes a mini seminar series highlighting departmental research. 

Who's Recuiting Ph.D. Students for 2024? 

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Environmental Engineering & Science

Northwestern’s Environmental engineers are committed to identifying and designing solutions for today’s environmental problems. Their research is committed to protecting the environment from the harmful effects of human activity, protecting human populations from adverse environmental events such as floods and disease, and restoring environmental quality for ecological and human well-being. Some of the faculty are researching ways to pursue safe drinking water, treating and properly disposing of wastes, maintaining air quality, controlling water pollution, and remediating sites contaminated by hazardous substances. 

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Mechanics, Materials, & Structural Engineering

Mechanics, materials, and structures combine the fundamental physical sciences with powerful mathematical, computational, and experimental techniques to develop fundamental understanding of material behavior at multiple scales, achieving superior performance of these materials in all engineering fields, and predicting service life and failure of materials and structures. It also aims to optimize advanced structures and materials, increase their load-carrying capability and improve their resistance to failure.

Faculty members are engaged in cutting-edge research in computational mechanics, composite materials, nanocomposites, fracture mechanics and nondestructive evaluation. 

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Transportation Engineering

The Transportation faculty are committing to finding solutions to the dynamic and rapidly changing transportation environment. There are particular foci on the interrelationships between transportation, urban systems, information services, and production planning, as well as an adaptability to change. and to have the vision and insight needed to implement creative options in a dynamic world.

Graduate students researching transportation will work closely with the Northwestern University Transportation Center (NUTC). In August 2020, NUTC has been awarded one of four new Tier 1 University Transportation Centers (UTC) funded by the U.S. Department of Transportation to advance research and education programs to address critical transportation challenges facing the nation. Telemobility, the name of Northwestern’s new UTC in consortium with the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Texas, Austin, will focus on assessing how ICT technologies and e-commerce processes will impact the demand for travel and mobility in the future, taking into consideration lessons learned from this dramatic natural experiment.

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Geotechnical Engineering

Our geotechnical faculty focus on the science and engineering of soil and rock, and of the water and other fluids that permeate them, in order to address national and global issues. These include infrastructure construction and reconstruction, mitigation of natural hazards, and frontier exploration and development.

We have three faculty active in this research area:

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