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About Environmental Engineering Profession
      
Welcome home to the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Old Dominion University.

Professional opportunities in environmental engineering have grown dramatically in recent years in response to public and governmental concerns about a decrease in the quality of the natural environment. Along with these concerns there has been widespread recognition that prevention of further declines in environmental quality is necessary to maintain a healthy, sustainable habitat.

Interest in improving environmental conditions and insuring against further declines has led to significant growth in the environmental field. Opportunities in consulting practice have included providing engineering services in the areas of water, wastewater, solid and hazardous waste, air pollution control, and hazardous site remediation. In addition, working as environmental program managers in industry, developing environmental policy and regulation within government, and pursuing a career path in environmental law are all areas that environmental engineers have been engaged.

Completion of an undergraduate degree in environmental engineering provides excellent preparation for graduate-level study in environmental engineering and related fields. Graduate studies provide greater technical competency and provide a research component not typically available at the undergraduate level. Graduate degrees, particularly the Ph.D., are typically required for academic positions in universities and for research positions in major industries and government agencies.

Here's the index of information on the Bachelor of Science degree program in Environmental Engineering.


About Old Dominion University
      
Old Dominion University, founded in 1930, is a state-supported institution in Norfolk, Virginia and has a combined undergraduate and graduate student population of 20,800.

The 200-acres of Old Dominion's campus is located in Norfolk, Virginia, the hub of the world's largest natural harbor. The university is within the coastal region of Virginia at the confluence of the James and Elizabeth Rivers with the Chesapeake Bay, and it is only 20 miles from the pounding surf of Virginia Beach. The population of the metropolitan region is approximately 1.3 million, and includes the state's most populated city, Virginia Beach.

The university operates on the semester system with a spring and fall semester and a variety of semester options in the summer.


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Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
      
The Civil and Environmental Engineering Department is one of six departments in the College of Engineering and Technology and is located in Kaufman Hall. At the undergraduate level, the Department offers an ABET accredited Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree in Civil Engineering. The Department also offers a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree in Environmental Engineering.

At the graduate level the Department offers Master of Engineering (M.E.), Master of Science (M.S.) and Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degrees in Civil Engineering and in Environmental Engineering, and it enrolls 90 students. The graduate programs are structured to accommodate both the full-time and part-time students. The available specialty areas are coastal, geotechnical, structural, and water resources engineering in Civil engineering and a variety of sub-fields in Environmental engineering.

There are 12 full-time faculty in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. All hold doctoral degrees. Many are widely recognized nationally and internationally for their scholarly activities.

Current faculty research projects and interests span a wide range of technical areas.

  • The coastal engineering research covers documented evidence of the impact of seawalls on adjacent beaches, economic alternatives to increase the fill life of renourished beaches, current effects on wave transformation in shallow water, and computeraided design of coastal structures.

  • Environmental and water resources research includes particle removal and ozone in water treatment, coagulation and organics removal, environmental monitoring, transport and fate of contaminants in lakes and reservoirs, chemical equilibrium modeling, water quality modeling, dewatering of water treatment residuals, GIS-based spartial and temporal surface and groundwater modeling, air pollution control, hazardous waste management, urban storm-drainage systems and computational hydraulics.

  • In geotechnical and earthquake studies, faculty are researching below-and above-ground lifeline systems which are subjected to various seismic environments, soil-structure interaction, soil dynamics, granular mechanics, and soil liquefaction during earthquakes.

  • On the structural engineering side, faculty interests include, polymer-fiber composite materials, fiber reinforced concrete, base isolation and energy absorptions for bridges, stability and behavior of steel structures, passive damping of space structures, parallel computing techniques in nonlinear structural mechanics, fatigue fracture, finite element analysis, and structural optimization.

  • In transportation studies, faculty are involved in traffic engineering, traffic operations, transportation safety and analysis, work zone traffic control, traffic simulation, sustainable transportation, intelligent transportation systems-behavioral and network impacts, and their planning/operation.

Bachelor of Science in Environmental Engineering (BSEnvE)
      
The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering offers a four-year undergraduate program leading to the B.S. Degree in Environmental Engineering. The curriculum is designed to educate engineers in the fundamentals of physical, chemical, and biological processes. The curriculum is designed to develop the ability within students to understand the complex natures of natural and engineered systems and how to apply this understanding to the conception, analysis, and design of solutions to real-world environmental problems. In the senior year, a capstone design course culminates the degree program by having students work collaboratively to develop an engineering solution to a real-world environmental problem.

Graduates are prepared for professional careers in environmental or civil engineering or related fields. The B.S.Env.E. degree is recognized as pre-Law, pre-Medicine, and pre-MBA at many professional schools and universities.