Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Environmental & Energy Systems

Treatment, distribution and collection of water and wastewater are energy intensive operations, and energy generation and distribution have direct and indirect impacts on environmental systems. This area addresses these interrelated challenges by focusing on the treatment and supply of water for municipal agricultural, energy, and environmental uses, sustainable practices for managing urban stormwater, and chemical and microbiological processes for water treatment. Additionally, novel approaches for energy generation and distribution are covered in this area. Understanding and minimizing emissions of greenhouse gasses associated with water and wastewater treatment and energy generation and distribution are common themes in this area.
 

Faculty
 

Amir AghaKouchak
UCI Chancellor's Professor
Ph.D. University of Stuttgart, Germany
Modeling hydroclimate extremes, remote sensing of environment, hydrologic processes, and climate change and variability

Tirtha Banerjee
Associate Professor
Ph.D. Duke University
Atmospheric boundary layer dynamics, turbulent fluid dynamics, land/water/vegetation - atmosphere interaction, wildfires, vegetation dynamics, carbon and water cycles, hydrology, wetlands and terrestrial aquatic interfaces

Jack Brouwer
Professor
Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Advanced energy technologies, fuel cells, energy sources and pollutant emission

Kristen Davis
Associate Professor
Ph.D. Stanford University
Coastal ocean circulation, cross-shelf exchange, benthic-pelagic coupling, stratified-shear flows, internal waves, boundary layers, and turbulent flows

Steve Davis
Professor
Ph.D. Stanford University
Energy technology and policy; emissions and energy embodied in international trade; life-cycle assessment; interactions of agriculture and climate; human drivers of greenhouse gas emissions; and socioeconomic inertia of climate change

Russell Detwiler
Associate Professor
Ph.D. University of Colorado
Groundwater hydrology, contaminant fate and transport, subsurface process modeling, groundwater/surface-water interaction

Derek Dunn-Rankin
Professor Emeritus
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley
Combustion, optical particle sizing, particle aero-dynamics, laser diagnostics and spectroscopy

Efi Foufoula-Georgiou
Distinguished Professor
Ph.D. University of Florida
Hydrology and geomorphology with emphasis on modeling the interactions between the atmosphere, land, and the terrestrial environment at plot to large-watershed scale

Shakira Hobbs
Assistant Professor
Ph.D. Clemson University
Global sustainability, resource recovery from anthropogenic waste, and life cycle thinking applied to engineering equity at the food-energy-water nexus

Kuo-lin Hsu
Professor
Ph.D. University of Arizona
Hydrologic modeling; artificial neural network applications in hydrology

C. Sunny Jiang
Professor
Ph.D. University of South Florida
Water pollution microbiology, environmental biotechnology, aquatic microbial ecology

Phu Nguyen
Associate Adjunct Professor
Ph.D. University of California, Irvine
Flood warnings, global extreme satellite precipitation event database using object-oriented approaches, integrated system for global satellite precipitation and information, and global real-time satellite and crowdsourced precipitation observations for hydrologic and natural disaster management applications

Christopher Olivares Martinez
Assistant Professor
Ph.D. University of Arizona
Environmental biotechnology, remediation, metabolomics, pollutant fate in natural and engineered systems, microbial toxicity, environmental organic chemistry

James Randerson
UCI Chancellor's Professor
Ph.D. Stanford University
Fires, greenhouse gases, land cover change, tropical deforestation, global change in arctic and boreal ecosystems, biogeochemical cycles, remote sensing and climate policy

Eric Rignot
Professor
Ph.D. University of Southern California
Physical climate

Diego Rosso
Professor
Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles
Environmental process engineering, mass transfer, wastewater treatment, carbon- and energy-footprint analysis

Scott Samuelsen
Professor Emeritus
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley
Energy, fuel cells, hydrogen economy, propulsion, combustion and environmental conflict; turbulent transport in complex flows, spray physics, NOx and soot formation, laser diagnostics and experimental methods; application of engineering science to practical propulsion and stationary systems; environmental ethics

Brett Sanders
Professor
Ph.D. University of Michigan
Environmental and computational fluid dynamics, water resources engineering

Jean-Daniel Saphores
Professor and Chair
Ph.D. Cornell University
Transportation economics, planning and policy, environmental and natural resource economics and policy, quantitative methods

Soroosh Sorooshian
Distinguished Professor
Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles
Hydrology, hydrometeorology and hydroclimate modeling, remote sensing, water sources management

Jasper Vrugt
Professor
Ph.D. University of Amsterdam
Ecology, aerosol-cloud interactions, hydrometeorology, parallel computing, uncertainty quantification, data assimilation, parameter estimation, Bayesian statistics

Introduction to Program

Plans of Study

Quick Links

More Information

Russell Detwiler, Ph.D.
Associate Professor & Graduate Advisor
detwiler@uci.edu 
(949) 824-7152 
 

Graduate Department

ceegraddept@uci.edu