Message from the Chair
Welcome to the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering’s website! It describes the academic, research, and professional activities of our faculty and students. Whether you are looking for the" right" university to continue your education, or would just like to know more about our program, we hope this website will provide everything you want to know about our activities, our programs, and life at LSU.
We continuously strive to improve our undergraduate curricula, graduate programs, and research directions. One of our main goals as we do this is to produce future leaders who can creatively apply their knowledge, especially, in Civil and Environmental Engineering. An important aspect of our curriculum review effort is to make information technology an integral part of the teaching and learning processes. As the computer provides added capability in the hands of the students, we exploit it in their learning process as well. The curriculum review process involves reexamining the discipline groupings that have slowly grown within Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) as well as within other engineering branches. We carefully and continually assess what we want our graduates to know at the time of graduation and also at the end of each course.
We offer Bachelor of Science degrees in both Civil Engineering and in Environmental Engineering, with selective minors within these fields. Different student organizations exist in our department such as the American Association of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the Louisiana Water and Environmental Association (LWEA) student chapters. In addition we offer Master of Science degrees in both Civil Engineering and in Coastal and Ecological Engineering. We also offer the PhD degree in Civil Engineering. Opportunities are provided to our undergraduate students through numerous scholarships and to our graduate students through Fellowships, and research and teaching assistantships.
The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering has experienced a sizeable growth during the last decade, in both graduate student enrollment and faculty. We currently have faculty members in a number of areas of specialization at the undergraduate and graduate level:
- Coastal Engineering
- Environmental Engineering
- Geotechnical and Geophysical Engineering
- Material Modeling and Visualization
- Mechanics of Materials
- Structural Engineering
- Transportation Engineering
- Water Resources Engineering
Research funding in the Department has doubled in the last five years. Faculty have secured over 4.5 million dollars in research funding from State, Federal and Private organizations. The Department has the second highest enrollment of graduate students in the University.
The objective of our research program is to find effective solutions to the problems currently faced by the profession and then to predict the issues that may challenge the profession in the future. In the process, we will be educating individuals who are equipped to effectively respond to such challenges. The CEE programs are faced with the continuous challenge of securing adequate laboratory and space resources, computing facilities, and basic instrumentation to support the faculty’s effort to pursue sponsored research funding.
The CEE faculty is making vigorous efforts to undertake collaborative research across discipline areas within the department, across different fields of engineering within the college, across the different departments and colleges in the university, and across universities. These efforts reflect the interdisciplinary nature of present day research efforts and help to attract sponsored research proposed by interdisciplinary research teams and industrial partnerships.
George Z. Voyiadjis
Chair of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Boyd Professor and
Bingham C. Stewart Distinguished Professor of Engineering