Georgia Institute of Technology School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

The technological and managerial evolution of construction and infrastructure systems engineering in the last few decades demands a new generation of modern engineers.

Our students become those engineers — professionals who know how to build civil infrastructure projects that meet safety, quality, environmental and other requirements while effectively controlling the project’s cost and duration. They become capable infrastructure managers and utility engineers through a technical and integrated systems approach to the analysis and management of complex infrastructure systems.

We teach our graduate students established methods and encourage them to research and develop new ones. Students participate in state-of-the-art basic and applied projects in construction information technology, construction data modeling and visualization, infrastructure sensors and sensor systems, infrastructure systems modeling and risk analysis, knowledge management for decision-support systems, and other advanced technology-based areas.

The interdisciplinary nature of construction and infrastructure systems engineering encourages students to supplement their graduate program with courses from other areas at Georgia Tech, including computer science, electrical and computer engineering, mechanical engineering, building construction, and industrial and systems engineering.

Our Environmental Engineering program provides comprehensive educational and research opportunities in air, land, and water science and engineering. Our faculty members have a broad range of experience and expertise. They work in top-notch research facilities. They collaborate extensively with other engineering and science faculty across campus.

That means we attract the highest-caliber students from a variety of engineering and science backgrounds. And we design your master’s or Ph.D. program specifically for your professional goals.

Our endeavors focus on environmental biotechnology; water quality and treatment; wastewater reclamation and reuse; hazardous and solid waste engineering; ground water modeling and treatment; air quality monitoring; pollution control and modeling; environmental sciences; and industrial ecology. And our program is a key component in campus-wide initiatives on biological engineering, bioscience and biotechnology, nanotechnology, materials science and technology, sustainable technology and development, environmental science and technology, and energy systems.

Our geosystems engineering program merges geotechnics, geophysics, geomechanics and geology.

We focus on the behavior of natural materials in engineered systems, encompassing traditional and emerging topics within the field — like advanced techniques for site and material characterization; constitutive and micromechanical modeling; natural and man-made hazard mitigation; engineered soils; biotechnology; geotechnical aspects of resource recovery; and foundation design, slope stability, and excavation support.

Our graduate students work with world-class faculty to conduct fundamental and applied research using analytical, numerical, and experimental methods. They also help us teach and participate in a wide range of professional development and social activities coordinated by the Georgia Tech Geotechnical Society.

Facilities

Geosystems instruction facilities, research groups and laboratories occupy more than 10,000 square feet of custom space in the Mason Building. The research groups include:

Geoenvironmental Engineering Group

In-Situ Testing Research Group

Rock and Fracture Mechanics Research Group

Our program’s academic and research activities have earned an international reputation for excellence — a reputation strengthened by an environment that fosters learning, discovery and creativity.

That world renown comes from our work in: creative use of advanced structural materials and composite systems to improve infrastructure; earthquake engineering; cladding effects on, and hybrid control of, the response of tall buildings to earthquakes and wind; steel connection design and behavior; and structural reliability and risk assessment.

Our students learn about — and conduct advance research on — structural analysis and design, the behavior of structural systems, earthquake engineering, engineering science and mechanics, high-performance materials, computer-aided engineering, risk and reliability, and intelligent engineering learning environments.

They are encouraged to form partnerships with each other and our faculty members to develop their skills and advance our profession. And we foster a multidisciplinary environment where we’re developing solutions to engineering problems of national and international importance.

Facilities

Our School is equipped with state-of-the-art laboratories and instruments for all aspects of modern structural engineering and structural mechanics and materials research. This includes:

• An 18,000-square-foot Structures and Materials Laboratory with an 8,000-square-foot strong floor, an L-shaped reaction wall with capacities of 100-300 kips, and two 30-ton-capacity cranes. More… (Learn about construction of this facility in STRUCTUREmag.)
• A broad range of universal testing machines, with capacity to 400 kips.
• Specialized facilities for mechanical testing with infrared thermography and photoelastic stress/strain analysis.
• A nondestructive evaluation/optics laboratory.
• A laser scanning confocal microscope.
• Numerous high-performance workstations equipped with state-of-the-art software in structural engineering and mechanics.

Transportation systems are the building blocks of modern society. Efficient and safe movement of information, people, goods and services ensures a thriving economy and improves our quality of life.

Our students study not only the efficient, safe design and operations of these critical linkages but also the systems’ influence on our travel behavior, how we design our communities and the quality of our environment. Working with our faculty of world-renowned scholars, graduate students also help improve the design and performance of our transportation systems as well as our understanding of how they fit into the environmental, institutional and social contexts of our society.

Students supplement their core technical transportation courses in urban planning, traffic engineering, highway and transit facility design, administration, and statistical analysis with interdisciplinary coursework from other units across Georgia Tech.

Facilities

Our research facilities include a unique traffic signal lab, an instrumented vehicle lab, and the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) laboratory.

Graduate students in Water Resources Engineering can expect a stimulating and diverse educational experience where you participate in innovative experimental, computational and modeling research that creates new knowledge.

Our program focuses on water, air, and land systems, with emphasis on the science and engineering applications of environmental transport processes and sustainable resource management. And our students and faculty members develop their research into new technologies that benefit engineering practice in fluid mechanics, hydraulics, hydrology, hydroclimatology, and water resources.

Facilities

The Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory includes a large constant-head tank, a 4.3 m wide sediment scour flume, a 24 m long tilting flume, a recirculating flume for cohesive sediment resuspension, a recirculating salt-water flume, a density-stratified towing tank, and a 24 m long wave tank. Instrumentation includes Acoustic Doppler Velocimetry (ADV), Laser Doppler Velocimetry (LDV), Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV), Laser-Induced Fluorescence (LIF), and three-dimensional visualization.

The Computational Laboratory includes a 16-node (64 CPUs) High Performance computing cluster and a number of Linux workstations. An eight-CPU, 32GB RAM visualization workstation was recently added. Our graduate students also have access to Georgia Tech's high performance computing systems and several European supercomputers.

Field instrumentation includes pressure transducers and ther mistors; a Campbell Scientific Eddy Covariance Tower System that directly measures sensible, latent and CO₂ fluxes between the terrestrial landscape through the atmosphere. This tower includes soil moisture probes, a rain gauge and dataloggers. Additional equipment includes an ISCO portable water sampler with ultrasonic level sensor and rain gauge, a depth-integrating suspended sediment sampler, a bed sediment sampler, a PPP Spectral Analyzer, and current meters.