Within the M.S./Ph.D. course and research opportunities offered for Duke graduate environmental engineering students, there are two tracks of study encompassing water resource engineering, hydrology, environmental fluid dynamics, and chemical and biological aspects of pollution of water, atmosphere, and soil, among others.
Students must satisfy specific course requirements for each the chosen study track in addition to the required courses for a M.S./Ph.D. degree. Students should perceive their coursework not only as a preparation
for the needs of their specific research but also as a foundation
for their further professional growth in the years to come. The
combination of departmental and track-specific core courses will
greatly enhance that growth.
The list below includes the primary environmental engineering faculty within the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.