Research
Convergent research with collaboration across government, industry, and academia
The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering attracts exceptional faculty who conduct state-of-the-art research, are dedicated educators at both the undergraduate and graduate level, and advance the state of professional practice. Faculty conduct interdisciplinary research in department research areas, as part of the college’s multidisciplinary research centers, and within their laboratories, as well as working across the university, and with industry, government, and academia.
The department also has dedicated staff who provide a range of operational services, including laboratory technicians, a dedicated machine shop, and budget and finance.
View faculty profiles including faculty laboratory research, and recent Annual Reports.
Quick Facts
external research funding (2022-24)
young investigator awards
research centers and institutes
tenured/tenure-track faculty
The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering education and research missions are focused on Urban Engineering, anchored by several multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional centers and programs. Building on current strengths and expanding into new and vital areas, three overarching interdisciplinary research and education thrusts of the department include Environmental Health, Civil Infrastructure Security, and Sustainable Resource Engineering, with subthemes and disciplinary excellence in each of these areas. We have premier departmental strengths in four integrated enabling technologies that include Simulation (both computational and experimental), Smart Sensing, and Data and Network Science, and Urban Informatics.
q.wang@northeastern.edu
Urban and social resilience; geo-social networking; coupled, human-natural systems, natural disaster response and evacuation; urban computing
ya.zhang@northeastern.edu
Air quality; atmospheric chemistry; cloud/aerosol microphysics; sensitivity and uncertainty analysis; multiscale atmospheric modeling and forecasting; climate and Earth system modeling; health impact assessment; eco-environmental sustainability; human-Earth system interactions
Recent News
Northeastern Launches Physical AI Research Initiative, Unveils NU-WORLD Platform
Northeastern University launched the Physical AI Research (PAIR) Initiative on May 21–22, bringing together over 200 researchers, industry leaders, entrepreneurs, and government representatives to advance intelligent systems that learn from and act in the physical world. The two-day event featured keynote talks, the public debut of Northeastern’s open world-model platform NU-WORLD, and broad participation from organizations including NVIDIA, Amazon Robotics, Boston Dynamics, and Microsoft — signaling strong momentum around a field that spans robotics, healthcare, manufacturing, and beyond.
Fulbright-Bound: How a Northeastern Professor Is Using Robots to Unlock Iceland’s Ancient Hydrothermal Vents
Second-time Fullbright recipient and MES/CEE Professor Mark Patterson has plans to study the hydrothermal vents of Iceland, hoping to examine how the marine ecosystem is responding to microplastics and ocean acidification.
SDS Lab PhD Student Wins Google TPU Research Cloud Award for AI Weather Prediction
Diyali Goswami, MS’24, PhD, civil and environmental engineering, who develops machine learning and AI methods for weather prediction at the Northeastern University Sustainability and Data Sciences Laboratory (SDS Lab), has won a prestigious award through a highly competitive international proposal process.
Translating a Building Operations Pilot with Fullbright Scholar
CEE Associate Professor Michael Kane helped build a 14-hour building operators training certification pilot, that he is now going to take to Argentina as a Fullbright Scholar, and translate the program into Spanish.