Messages from the Department Head
Winter 2022 - With Gratitude and Determination
Dear CEE Friends,
I am delighted to reach out as we approach the winter break and share my optimism for CEE as a new year awaits just a few weeks away on the horizon. The state of the department is very strong.
On the undergraduate front, enrollment numbers are promising; this fall we welcomed the largest number of first-year students in 10 years, resulting in about 690 undergraduate students in total. Our undergraduate curriculum redesign effort compares favorably with a recent report on the future of CEE education from the American Society of Civil Engineers which states, “Students need to learn systems thinking so that they are prepared for current and future societal challenges.” We have developed a new certificate in Data Science and Computing available to undergraduate students that will provide them with literacy in big data, machine learning and computing. For the first time in its history, beginning in fall 2023, the department will offer a Bachelor of Science degree in Environmental Engineering; previously all B.S. graduates earned degrees in Civil Engineering, regardless of concentration. We offer funded research opportunities for many of our undergraduate students each year through our Research Experience for Undergraduates program – thanks in large part to gifts from our alumni. Also thanks to your generosity, we continue to provide substantial funding to the student organizations that do so much to enhance the Illinois experience.
Our CEE graduate programs are equally strong. U.S. News & World Report ranks our online graduate program at No. 1, our graduate Civil Engineering program at No. 2, and our graduate Environmental Engineering program at No. 3. We have more Ph.D. students than at any time in the past decade. New initiatives in the graduate program include four new M.S. tracks, including materials and manufacturing, systems, railway engineering and engineering mobility. Another new initiative is our Graduate Ambassadors Program, through which we are actively recruiting for our graduate programs at other universities in the Midwest, with the aim of increasing our numbers of domestic graduate students.
Our research enterprise has seen funding increase by 18.6% from FY20 to FY21. In FY22 our faculty had an unusually high number of winners of the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award, NSF’s most prestigious form of support and recognition for junior faculty – assistant professors R.D. Cusick, Franklin T. Lombardo, X. Shelly Zhang and Lei Zhao. Assistant professor Christopher Tessum won an equally prestigious Early Career Award from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Some exciting highlights of our research program include projects in Human-Centric Water and Energy, Community Resilience and Risk, Climate Change and Health, and Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation.
We are proud of the continued excellence of the department, but we never stop working toward improvement. The success of our efforts makes us all the more determined to keep advancing as we strive to meet the challenges of the 21st century as the world’s top civil and environmental engineering program. A key reason for our excellence is the support of our alumni and friends. One of the most prominent features in this issue of the magazine is our annual section on the impact of your gifts. You will hear from young alumni about how our Research Experience for Undergraduates program affected their education and career trajectories. Other alumni talk about how our recruiting scholarships made it possible to attend Illinois and paved their way to successful careers. We are grateful for your gifts in these impactful areas, and we know we can count on your continued support to do even more in the coming years.
Even as we work to complete the furnishing of all our new laboratory spaces in the new Civil and Environmental Engineering Building, we have started planning for what I have begun to call “Newmark 2050.” We are thinking about the changes that will be necessary to ensure that Newmark Civil Engineering Laboratory, our department’s home since the 1960s, will continue to enable excellence and serve our students, faculty and staff in the future.
In this season of Thanksgiving, know that we are grateful for all of you – our alumni and friends who remain engaged with the department; give of their time, talent and treasure to help CEE at Illinois maintain its longstanding excellence; and represent us so well as practicing professionals around the world.
-Ana P. Barros Donald Biggar Willett Chair of Engineering Department Head, Civil and Environmental Engineering