Messages from the Department Head

Summer 2022 - With Gratitude and Determination

Dear CEE Friends, 

We were delighted this spring to be able to host a Grand Opening celebration for donors to our new Civil and Environmental Engineering Building and the Kavita and Lalit Bahl Smart Bridge. After several pandemic delays, it was exciting on April 29, 2022, to finally be able to welcome about 400 of our generous alumni and friends who made these beautiful new spaces possible. Photos of that exciting day appear later in this issue. 

As you know, the new building and smart bridge were a long time in coming. Efforts began in 2015 to plan the project and fundraise to make it possible. Many of you – about 600 individuals and companies in total – stepped up to help us meet that challenge with gifts and pledges totaling more than $12 million. The Grainger College of Engineering and the campus contributed $2 million each, and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering committed $11 million to this $32 million project. Today, our students and faculty are realizing the benefits of this ambitious plan. 

Although these spaces are in use – and will enhance the experience of generations of CEE students to come – our work is not done with regards to funding them. We still have a funding gap of more than $4 million. This has resulted in some of the labs currently lacking furnishings and equipment. In addition, beginning this year we will need to pay interest on the construction debt. This comes to approximately $150,000 per year – money that could be spent in countless other ways to benefit our students. Your help is still needed in helping us realize the full potential of this project. There are still naming opportunities available throughout the building. 

Another important department priority is to improve our ability to recruit top undergraduate students by increasing the funds available for scholarships. The scholarships currently available within CEE to rising sophomores, juniors and seniors are plentiful and very needed; this past spring we were able to award $284,000 through 120 scholarships for these students. You can see the full list of scholarships and many photos of these deserving students on pages 30 and 31 of this issue. 

But we also have a great need for a different kind of scholarship: those we can offer to highly qualified, prospective first-year students to encourage them to accept their offers of admission to UIUC. These scholarships are used to improve access for women, under-represented minorities and first-generation college students, as well as to make a UIUC education more affordable for Illinois students, who in many cases are enticed by lower tuition at out-of-state schools – public and private alike – that compete with us for the very top, most qualified students. 

Our efforts to improve access to populations not currently well-represented in CEE can be seen in our incoming class for fall 2022, which is the biggest first-year class in the history of the department with 218 students:

•  Our percentage of women first-years will be 33 percent – the highest ever.
• Fully 18 percent of the class will be under-represented minorities.

Although we are encouraged by these successes, we realize there is more work to be done. Only nine of our incoming first-years are first-generation college students; we have a particular need for scholarship funds for this population. And we hope to grow our numbers of women and under-represented minorities so that we are producing civil and environmental engineers who truly reflect the diversity of society. We know that the CEE profession and the world we serve will be better for it. 

We are confident that the civil and environmental engineering education we provide here at Illinois is second-to-none. Our aim now is to open the doors a bit wider so that the outstanding education we provide can be offered to an evermore-diverse population of top students. 

I have seen the profound impact of your generosity and commitment to CEE at Illinois with the realization of our beautiful, transformative new spaces. I am confident that with your help, our next priority to offer more recruiting scholarships will become a reality, clearing the path for a new generation of top students from all backgrounds to join the Illinois family and serve society as CEE leaders. 

Be assured that your home department at UIUC is very strong. Research expenditures have increased approximately 20 percent in the past year. Junior faculty are opening up new avenues of research; several more this year have won prestigious research awards from the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Senior faculty are receiving much-deserved national and international recognition. Applications to CEE have grown, reflected in the record-setting size of our first-year class. And as always, our alumni continue to help us maintain our world-class reputation through their work around the globe as Illini Engineers.

-Ana P. Barros                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Donald Biggar Willett Chair of Engineering                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Department Head, Civil and Environmental Engineering