The Environmental Engineering and Science (EE&S) group within CEE at Illinois prepares students for the increasingly critical role of addressing the world’s challenges of air, land and water pollution. Sustainable engineering practices for both developed and developing societies are a primary focus of the EE&S program. The program is sufficiently flexible to accommodate a wide variety of interests and backgrounds. Cooperation with other departments and programs of the University encourages the development of a coordinated approach to the solution of complex environmental problems. Each specialty area is built on required core courses and appropriate advanced and elective courses, chosen in consultation with the student’s advisor, to meet the student’s need and graduation requirements. Course offerings, program requirements can be found in the Undergraduate and Graduate Handbooks.
Through cooperation with colleagues in other countries, EE&S faculty members offer their students a global perspective on environmental engineering, as well as opportunities to travel and collaborate on research projects with international relevance. Collaborative programs are ongoing with colleagues in Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Several major national initiatives and centers are located at Illinois, offering further opportunity for student participation in research and enrichment of the curriculum. For example, many EE&S faculty are involved in projects through the Water CAMPWS, a research center devoted to new materials for water purification, funded by the National Science Foundation.
Research interests of the EE&S faculty include:
- Water disinfection
- Environmental decision-making
- Environmental management and policy analysis
- Sustainable urban development
- Aquatic ecology, aquatic ecosystem management
- Water and air qualitysensors and modeling
- Environmental microbiology and genomics
- Watershed modeling
- Water reuse
- Environmental biotechnology and nanotechnology
- Microbial genomics
- Environmental systems analysis, risk and uncertainty in decision making
- Environmentally conscious design and manufacturing
- Groundwater contamination and remediation
- Hazardous waste remediation
- Antibiotic resistance and treatment
- Interactions between regional and global-scale air pollution