Messages from the Department Head
Summer 2021 - New Beginnings
Dear CEE Friends,
In February 2021, I joined CEE at Illinois as the sixteenth head in the department’s more than 150-year history. I write these words on a beautiful Sunday afternoon from my office in the Newmark Civil Engineering Laboratory. Summer is fast approaching, Illinois is entering Phase 5 of the state’s reopening plans, and we are all set to return to in-person instruction in the fall.
It is an exciting time to join CEE at Illinois! As the world emerges from the pandemic, our department has even more to celebrate. Our beautiful new CEE building and the Kavita and Lalit Bahl Smart Bridge are nearing completion. This fall, we will be welcoming more than 500 new undergraduate and graduate students to CEE, one of our most academically impressive and diverse classes yet. We are eager to welcome them as they join the more than 800 current students and 17,000 CEE alumni in the Illini family. When our students arrive to campus, they will find brand new classrooms, laboratories and common areas in which to study and socialize. Reconfigurable classrooms will support team- and project-based learning. Teaching laboratories will support our plan to incorporate even more hands-on learning into our curriculum. The increased square footage will provide room for our growing department with more office space for our burgeoning population of graduate students and our faculty, now approaching 60 tenured and tenure-track professors. The new, fully instrumented Smart Bridge will give our faculty a teaching tool that will be unique among our peer institutions. This is a remarkable achievement in CEE’s long history, and we want to express our deepest appreciation to our alumni and supporters who made it possible.
Recently our faculty has begun implementing a newly renovated curriculum, designed to prepare our graduates for the changing landscape of civil and environmental engineering. Key features of this plan include a greater focus on big data and computational skills, experiential learning, critical thinking, communication and entrepreneurship – as well as the rigorous focus on the fundamentals that has always characterized the CEE at Illinois student experience. This new curriculum is just part of the vibrant undergraduate experience in CEE at Illinois, featured in this issue of the magazine. You may recognize some of the experiences in which you shared as alumni – such as the Concrete Canoe Team – and be amazed by some of the innovations. And more to come!
We are increasingly hopeful that we will celebrate a grand opening of the building and the bridge on October 1, 2021, pending final approval by the University and with everyone’s safety in mind. We hope all of you who have given to support this critical initiative over the past six years of our building campaign will be present on campus to celebrate with us. So many of our distinguished faculty and alumni have been honored with named spaces in the building and bridge; our grand opening celebration will honor all of them, as well as our many generous donors.
In this issue of the CEE magazine, you can read about our new building and bridge, as well as about many of our other outstanding facilities that contribute to our world-class reputation. Among the planned spaces is the exciting Illinois Autonomous and Connected Track, which will be built at our transportation research facility in Rantoul, Ill., as part of the Smart Transportation Infrastructure Initiative. The John T. Pfeffer Sanitation and Resource Recovery Laboratory will enable research into the increasingly critical area of energy recovery from wastewater.
Our faculty and our students are pushing the frontiers of innovation in emerging areas from robotics technology to laying the foundations for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in structural monitoring and construction to the development of new materials and structural designs to reduce the carbon footprints of the built infrastructure, to biotechnology, from remote sensing to autonomy in transportation to Engineering Ecology in all its facets, and adaptation to a changing climate including sustainable food supply and water and energy resources, and environmental health. Today – just as roughly 100 years ago, when Nathan Newmark joined the department – CEE is ready to lead in developing the science and engineering the transformative solutions that will define civil and environmental engineering in the 21st century.
Our challenges to realize this potential are two-fold. First, we must continue and expand our student recruitment efforts to bring to Illinois outstanding future colleagues. To meet this challenge, we will endeavor to provide a superior educational experience that is in tune with students’ professional aspirations and societal needs, specifically with a focus on deepening and renewing our partnerships with industry and national agencies. We are also renewing our commitment to the undergraduate research experience to all our students before they graduate. Second, we must realize the full potential of spaces in our new building and across the department. The immediate challenge is to equip our teaching laboratories with the instruments and tools needed to meet our curriculum requirements. The medium-term challenge is to renovate spaces for implementing our vision for experiential learning starting in the first year and culminating in the senior year with comprehensive integrated systems design, specifically focusing on 3D Virtual Reality and combined physical-computational analysis and testing, among others.
The future of this great department is very bright. I am honored to take my place as Head of CEE at Illinois. We will endeavor to continue the tradition of excellence created by former heads, our preeminent faculty and our inspirational alumni. I know that I can count on our 17,000 graduates the world over to support us as you always have. You are truly the key to the department’s continued success, and I hope to meet many of you as our in-person alumni events resume.
I wish everyone a healthy and happy summer, and I am proud to write for the first time: Go Illini!
-Ana P. Barros Donald Biggar Willett Chair of Engineering Department Head, Civil and Environmental Engineering