Four CEE faculty members have been awarded named endowed professorships, in recognition of their outstanding contributions and leadership in their respective fields of expertise.

Ximing Cai has been named the Colonel Harry F. and Frankie M. Lovell Endowed Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering. Cai’s research interests include large-scale system optimization, river basin planning and management, drought management, water resources economics and policy, geographic information system and spatial statistics, and international water resources development.

Youssef Hashash has been named the Bill and Elaine Hall Endowed Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering. Hashash’s research interests include deep excavations, earthquake engineering, numerical modeling, and soil-structure interaction. He is also involved in the use of visualization and virtual reality techniques in geotechnical engineering applications.

Wen-Tso Liu has been named the Arthur C. Nauman Endowed Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering. Liu’s research interests focus on the microbial ecology and molecular microbiology aspects of water and wastewater treatment processes. Microorganisms are the key catalyst for wastewater treatment and resource recovery, and the primary causative agents for the failure of water purification systems and the occurrences of infectious diseases.  

Murugesu Sivapalan has been named the Chester and Helen Siess Endowed Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering. Sivapalan's research focuses on making predictions in ungaged basins. A basic aim of his research is to understand observed space-time variabilities of runoff processes at all scales, including their extremes, and to interpret these in terms of the underlying climate-soil-vegetation-topography interactions, including human impacts.

A formal investiture ceremony will be held in early 2015.