Environmental Engineering
Creating and maintaining clean and healthy environments is one of the most important tasks of our time. Globally, more than 700 million people lack access to safe water, 2.5 billion people lack access to improved sanitation, and carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are higher than at any point in the history of the planet. Revolutionary strategies are needed to engineer a symbiotic design for natural and manmade environments, with new technologies necessary to address increasing challenges to global environmental and public health. Civil and Environmental Engineers take vital leadership roles both technically and as trusted advisors, policy makers, and leaders to design and transform our environments.
Our expertise in environmental engineering is aimed at tackling interconnected challenges in the context of a changing planet, with the understanding that the health of our environment and the public are inextricably linked. This technical area at Northeastern University covers a wide range of technologies and design solutions for the biological and chemical processes that underlie water, solid waste, air, site assessment/remediation, and environmental health and safety.
Areas of study
- Impact of climate change
- Atmospheric chemistry and transport
- Air quality modeling and forecasting
- Biotechnology and microbial ecology
- Environmental microbiology and genomics
- Advanced water treatment processes
- Industrial ecology and techno-economic assessment
- Resource recovery
- Environmental and human health nexus
- Development of environmental remediation techniques
- Remote sensing of the environment
- Sensing of organic and inorganic pollutants in the environment
- Hardware and software tools to better monitor, predict, and mitigate environmental pollution and create clean environments
