research.

The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Duke University aims to be an ideal incubator for education and research where faculty and students engineer solutions to problems relevant to the natural and built environment. Gaining a deep understanding of these problems and providing adequate solutions for them require the knowledge and analytical approaches of several disciplines. Therefore, the faculty consists of engineers and scientists with different backgrounds, and it is strongly committed to interacting with other engineers and scientists at, and outside of, Duke University. As part of this commitment, the Department provides a bridge between the Pratt School of Engineering and the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences. Although each scholar's research normally is situated within a discipline and one or more of the natural and built environmental media (i.e., air, soil, water, and/or materials), the Department fosters collaborative research and teaching, and its overall research and pedagogical profile is multidisciplinary.

Chemical and Biological Processes

• Claudia K. Gunsch, Assistant Professor - Identification of gene expression variations linked to vapor-phase biofilter performance, Development of biosensors capable of pathogen and contaminant detection in water and air, Use of DNA chips to study the microbial ecology of groundwater and air treatment systems, Isolation and identification of novel genes in environmentally relevant microorganisms, Development of methods to control the release of genetically engineered microorganisms in natural and controlled environments.
• Heileen Hsu-Kim, Assistant Professor - chemical processes that affect the fate of trace metals in the environment
• Andrey Khlystov, Assistant Professor - 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, Assistant Professor and Warren Faculty Scholar - Applications of emerging ultraviolet technologies for disinfection of water and wastewater, control of disinfection by-products, and oxidation of organic contaminants.
• J. Jeffrey Peirce, Associate Professor - 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.
• Andrew J. Schuler, Assistant Professor - Nutrient removal from wastewater, use of molecular methods for the characterization of microbial populations involved in wastewater treatment, the effects of bacterial storage products on sedimentation processes.
• Mark R. Wiesner, Professor - Membrane processes, nanostructured materials, transport and fate of nanomaterials in the environment, colloidal and interfacial processes, and environmental systems analysis.

Materials, Structures and Geosystems

• Fred K. Boadu, Associate Professor - 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 - Theoretical and applied mechanics, computational fracture mechanics, nonlinear interfacial constitutive laws, finite element and mesh free methods.
• Henri P. Gavin, Associate Professor - Seismic vibration suppression, non-linear and semi-active control, vibration monitoring, laboratory and full-scale experiments.
• Tomasz A. Hueckel, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies- Theoretical soil and rock mechanics, theory of plasticity, environmental mechanics.
• Tod A. Laursen, Professor and Senior Associate Dean for Education - Structural and solid mechanics, inelastic material modeling, large deformation kinematics, finite-element concepts.
• Joseph C. Nadeau, Associate Professor of the Practice - Theoretical and applied mechanics, micromechanics, composite materials, probabilistic methods.
• Henry Petroski, Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor - Failure analysis, design theory, engineering case histories.
• Jeffrey T. Scruggs, Assistant Professor - 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 .
• Lawrence Virgin, Professor and Chair - Behavior of nonlinear dynamical systems.

Hydrology and Fluid Dynamics

• John Albertson, Associate Professor - 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 - 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 - Investigating the dynamics of water presence and water pathways in the environment. Understanding the physics of the hydrological cycle at all spatial and temporal scales, and applying this new knowledge to research and developing technologies for environmental assessment, prediction and control.
• Zbigniew J. Kabala, Associate Professor - Deterministic and stochastic modeling of water flow and contaminant transport in saturated and unsaturated heterogeneous porous media, theory of related measurements.
• Miguel A. Medina, Jr., Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies- Water resources, hydrologic and water quality mathematical modeling, integration of contaminant transport prediction models within a decision-analysis framework for risk assessment.
• Roger A. Pielke, Sr., Research Professor - Mesoscale meteorology through numerical modeling of the sea breeze and interaction among the mountains, oceans, boundary layer, and the free atmosphere
• Amilcare Porporato, Associate Professor - 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.

There are also several centers and research groups in which our faculty are associated. They include:

• The Center for Biologically Inspired Materials and Material Systems
• The Center for Nonlinear and Complex Systems
• The Center for Applied Control
• The Computational Mechanics Research Group