faculty.

The civil and environmental engineering program at Duke is built upon the expertise and experience of a prominent faculty and is supported by commensurate laboratory and instructional facilities. Duke's civil and environmental engineering professors are committed to provide quality classroom instruction, advising, and laboratory experiences in settings that encourage student-faculty as well as student-student interactions. The faculty conducts research of national and international consequence and students have ample opportunities to be involved in such research. The research facilities in the department, including laboratory equipment and instrumentation as well as computer resources, are excellent resources used by both faculty and students to advance the state of knowledge in the field of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

The following is a listing of department faculty and their research interests.

primary faculty:

John Albertson, Associate Professor
Ph.D., University of California, Davis
Primary Research Interest: Environmental fluid mechanics, scaling in hydrology and boundary layer meteorology, use of computational fluid dynamics and field experiments to address issues of mass and energy exchange between the land and the atmosphere.

Roni Avissar, W. H. Gardner, Jr. Professor
Ph.D., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Primary Research Interest: All aspects of land-atmosphere and air-sea interactions (modeling and experiments) at all scales, including atmospheric dynamics, regional and global climate changes, hydroclimatology, soil-plant-atmosphere relationships, material dispersion and diffusion, and ecosystem modeling.

Ana Barros, Professor
Ph.D., University of Washington, Seattle
Primary Research Interest: Hydrology, Hydrometeorology and Environmental Physics with a focus on water-cycle processes in the coupled land-atmosphere-biosphere system particularly in regions of complex terrain, the study of multiscale interface phenomena in complex environments across the Earth Sciences, remote sensing of the environment (precipitation, clouds, soil moisture,and vegetation), climate predictability and risk assessment of natural hazards.

Fred K. Boadu, Associate Professor
Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology
Primary Research Interest: Engineering and environmental geophysics. Inverse theory applied to groundwater modeling and contaminant transport. Environmental mechanics. Characterization of fractured media using geophysical methods. Contamination detection and assessment using geophysical methods. Application of inverse theory and artificial neural networks to engineering and environmental problems.

John E. Dolbow, Associate Professor
Ph.D., Northwestern University
Primary Research Interest: Theoretical and applied mechanics, computational fracture mechanics, nonlinear interfacial constitutive laws, finite element and mesh free methods.

Henri P. Gavin, W. H. Gardner Jr. Associate Professor
Ph.D., University of Michigan
Primary Research Interest: Seismic vibration suppression, earthquake engineering, non-linear and semi-active control, vibration monitoring, laboratory and full-scale experiments.

Claudia K. Gunsch, Assistant Professor
Ph.D., University of Texas, Austin
Primary Research Interest: Application of molecular biological methods to monitor and improve performance of microbial engineering systems; Biodegradation of organic contaminants in wastewater treatment, groundwater bioremediation and vapor-phase biofiltration; Impacts of genetically engineered microbes on the environment.

Tomasz A. Hueckel, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Ph.D., Polish Academy of Sciences
D.Sc., University of Grenoble
Primary Research Interest: Theoretical soil and rock mechanics, theory of plasticity, environmental mechanics.

Heileen Hsu-Kim, Assistant Professor
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
Primary Research Interest: chemical processes that affect the fate of trace metals in the environment

Zbigniew J. Kabala, Associate Professor
Ph.D., Princeton University
Primary Research Interest: Deterministic and stochastic modeling of water flow and contaminant transport in saturated and unsaturated heterogeneous porous media, theory of related measurements.

Andrey Khlystov, Assistant Professor
Ph.D., Wageningen University
Primary Research Interest: Effect of ambient aerosol on the global climate and how aerosol hygroscopic growth affects the magnitude of climate forcing; exploring the relationship between particulate matter and adverse health effects; and development of new automatic measurement techniques to study the properties and transformations of ambient aerosol.

Tod A. Laursen, Professor and Senior Associate Dean for Education
Ph.D., Stanford University
Primary Research Interest: Structural and solid mechanics, inelastic material modeling, large deformation kinematics, finite-element concepts.

Karl G. Linden, Associate Professor
Ph.D., University of California at Davis
Primary Research Interest: Applications of emerging ultraviolet technologies for disinfection of water and wastewater, control of disinfection by-products, and oxidation of organic contaminants.

Miguel A. Medina, Jr.,Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Ph.D., University of Florida
Primary Research Interest: Water resources, hydrologic and water quality mathematical modeling, integration of contaminant transport prediction models within a decision-analysis framework for risk assessment.

Joseph C. Nadeau, Associate Professor of the Practice
Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley
Primary Research Interest: Theoretical and applied mechanics, micromechanics, composite materials, probabilistic methods.

J. Jeffrey Peirce, Associate Professor
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin
Primary Research Interest: Environmental engineering, hazardous waste engineering, physical, chemical, and biological aspects of particle-fluid interactions, models of trace gas emissions from waste- amended and chemically-applied soils.

Henry Petroski, Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor
Ph.D., University of Illinois
Primary Research Interest: Failure analysis, design theory, engineering case histories.

Amilcare Porporato, Associate Professor
Ph.D. Polytechnic of Turin, Italy
Primary Research Interest: Ecohydrology and coupled dynamics of the soil-plant-atmosphere system; environmental fluid mechanics and turbulence dynamics; dynamical system approach and stochastic modeling of hydrological and biogeophysical processes; nonlinear time series analysis; flood forecasting.

Jeffrey T. Scruggs, Assistant Professor
Ph.D., California Institute of Technology
Primary Research Interest: mechatronic systems for vibrating structures, nonlinear control of systems with constrained actuation, reliability-based structural design and control, semiactive vibration suppression, dynamics and control of tensegrity structures, and energy harvesting applications

Mark R. Wiesner, Professor
Ph.D., John Hopkins University
Primary Research Interest: membrane processes, nanostructured materials, transport and fate of nanomaterials in the environment, colloidal and interfacial processes, and environmental systems analysis.

Lawrence Virgin, Professor and Chair
Ph.D., University of London
Primary Research Interest: Nonlinear dynamics and chaos utilizing analytical numerical and experimental techniques, fundamental and practical applications of dynamical systems theory.

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research faculty:

Roger A. Pielke, Sr., Research Professor
Ph.D. Penn State
Primary Teaching/Research Areas: mesoscale meteorology through numerical modeling of the sea breeze and interaction among the mountains, oceans, boundary layer, and the free atmosphere

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secondary faculty:

Peter K. Haff, Professor
Ph.D., University of Virginia
Primary Teaching/Research Area: Development of new modeling tools for computer simulation of complex nonlinear mechanical systems, sediment transport.

Prasad Kasibhatla, Associate Professor
Ph.D., University of Kentucky
Primary Teaching/Research Area: Computational modeling of human-induced changes in atmospheric chemistry.

Gabriel G. Katul, Professor
Ph.D. University of California at Davis
Primary Teaching/Research Area: Integration of hydrological and environmental sciences with specific emphasis on environmental fluid mechanics and transport phenomena, land-surface processes, soil physics, and boundary layer meteorology.

Peter E. Malin, Professor
Ph.D., Princeton University
Primary Teaching/Research Area: Seismic wave propagation and instrumentation combining geophysics, geology, and engineering geoscience.

John Trangenstein, Professor
Ph.D., Cornell University
Primary Teaching/Research Area: Adaptive mesh refinement, Multigrid preconditioners, parameter estimation problems.

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adjunct faculty:

Jean-Yves Bottero, Adjunct Professor
Centre Européen de Recherche et d'Enseignement des Géosciences de l'Environnement
Primary Research Areas: Physical chemistry of organic, inorganic, and heterogeneous contaminants; physicochemical properties of surfaces; mechanisms of coagulation and flocculation; water and wastewater treatment.

Chris Brasier, Lecturer
MBA, Duke University, Bachelor of Environmental Design/Architecture, North Carolina State University
Primary Teaching/Research Area: Architecture.

Lyesse Laloui, Adjunct Professor
Professor, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland Ph.D. Ecole Centrale, Paris, France
Primary Research Areas: Natural and man-made systems with coupled phenomena. Environmental Geomechanics, Geotechnical and Geo-environmental Engineering, Mechanics of Multiphase Porous Materials.
Area of activities at Duke University: Thermo-mechanical behavior of soils, soil desiccation and shrinkage.

David Schaad, Adjunct Assistant Professor and Assistant Chair
Ph.D., Duke University
Primary Teaching/Research Area: Water and wastewater treatment design, stormwater retention/detention and treatment design, hazardous waste remediation, urban hydrology, constructed wetland and stream restoration design, ecological stabilization, sustainable engineering in land development, water resources, water and wastewater treatment.

Andrew J. Schuler, Adjunct Assistant Professor
Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley
Primary Research Interest: biological wastewater treatment processes, with an emphasis on nutrient removal and membrane bioreactors, biochemistry of microbial storage products and their effects on cell density and solids separation, and process simulation.

Daniel Vallero, Adjunct Associate Professor
Ph.D., Duke University
Primary Teaching/Research Area: Transport and transformation of organic compounds in environmental media, especially soil and the troposphere.

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emeritus faculty:

Earl I. Brown, J.A. Jones Professor Emeritus of Civil Engineering
Ph.D. University of Texas
Primary research interests: reinforced and prestressed concrete

James F. Wilson, Professor Emeritus
Ph.D. Engineering Mechanics, Ohio State University
Primary Teaching/Research Area: Engineering mechanics, theoretical and experimental mechanics and structural dynamics, robotics.

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