CEE Students, faculty, and alumni are excelling on behalf of humanity. Read on to find out more!
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College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences
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It's been a busy year in Civil and Environmental Engineering!
A Note from the Chair

CEE Newletter Image mdewoolkar_squareI hope you are all well during these challenging times. Here, at the University of Vermont (UVM), students, faculty and staff made a herculean effort over the spring break to transition to remote instruction. Regrettably we did not get a chance to hold an in-person graduation for our Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) graduates, but we will forever remember them for being a most resilient, patient and adaptable class. I share here a photograph of the congratulatory notes to the CEE graduates that I found on the walkway outside our building. It captures our graduates’ positive spirit and perseverance. 

CEE Newsletter Image Sidewalk ChalkWe all worked hard to prepare for the mixed-modes of instruction for the fall. CEE was able to offer 60 percent of our fall classes with some form of in-person experience for our students and 90 percent of CEE courses, irrespective of their primary modality, were made available to at-home students. Our goal is to assure that students continue to receive an outstanding education while also graduating on time. With careful health and safety protocols in place we were also able to reopen our labs and field research activities in late spring. UVM students are sticking to their Green & Gold Promise by wearing their masks and testing for COVID-19 once a week, and our test results reflect an outstanding negativity rate in excess of 99.9%. We plan to do what is required to keep this streak going! 

Now it gives me a great pleasure to share with you a few exciting stories about our students, alumni, faculty and staff. 

Best regards, 

Mandar M. Dewoolkar, PhD, PE, F ASCE 
Professor & Chair, Civil & Environmental Engineering 
 
 
 
Students Design Solutions for Vermont Communities

We had 14 senior capstone design course projects in 2019-2020. Projects spanned the range of our core disciplines and were Service Learning-based, meaning the students engaged with community partners as their clients, for guidance on the project goals, constraints, and feedback on design recommendations. Read more about the projects!

Service-learning is embraced by the department and throughout UVM as an experiential learning environment, where students learn from and are accountable to their community needs, as well as their course objectives. As part of this activity we also engaged a cadre of over fifteen design professionals along with our faculty. Their role was as specialty area technical advisors for teams, and also as project reviewers in formal design review sessions. 

CEE Newsletter Image Pedestrian cycle bridge 2

(above) Pedestrian and bicycle bridge design for Lake Champlain Causeway for the nonprofit Local Motion by seniors Connor Agro, Declan Martis, Jordan Shustack, Hunter Simpson and Jimmy Can Hook. 

 
 
 
 
 
CEE Faculty News

underwood-01Prof. Kristen Underwood received the Richard W. Carbin Community Conservation Award. Named after the land trust’s founder, this award recognizes those who demonstrate a commitment to conservation in their communities.


CEE Newsletter Images LensProf. John Lens was selected for UVM’s Outstanding New Service-Learning Faculty Award. Among other practice-oriented courses, John teaches our two-semester capstone design course sequence.


scarborough-01Prof. Matt Scarborough was awarded an Early Career Award from the American Society of Engineering Education for his paper entitled "Overcoming affective and cognitive chemistry challenges in an introductory environmental engineering course using a Flint Water Crisis case study." The study examined how a case study related to the Flint Water Crisis improved both performance on chemistry problems and attitudes towards chemistry. The award is given by the Environmental Engineering Division for the best paper from an early-career engineering educator. 


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Six great new CEE faculty joined the department in 2020-21 - Matthew Scarborough (Assistant Professor - Biological wastewater treatment, anaerobic bioprocessing of wastes, microbiome engineering, modeling of microbiomes); Gregory Rowangould (Associate Professor and Director of Transportation Research Center - Transportation system and land-use modeling, mobile source emissions and air quality analysis, regional transportation planning, transportation policy analysis); and three Research Assistant Professors (Dana Rowangould - Transportation and land use planning and policy, environmental justice, active travel, accessibility, health, and air pollution; Scott Hamshaw - Water resources, geomatics, machine learning, environmental sensing; and Elizabeth Doran - Urban climate, land use and land cover change, social-ecological systems, systems modeling, and sustainability); and Co-Director of Curricular Enrichment Courtney Giles - Biogeochemistry, rhizosphere processes, agricultural biotechnology, nutrient transport, innovative pedagogy, instructional research. 

CEE Newsletter Image Pinder

Professors George Pinder and William Gray, both members of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), introduced a new sophomore-level course for the Honors College in Spring 2020. The course was designed to reach students who did not have an engineering background, especially those that lacked knowledge of college physics or mathematics beyond algebra.
CEE Newsletter Image GrayTo access such students Pinder and Gray wrote and provided to the students a draft textbook. The book presented in algebraic form the physically based equations that describe water flow and contaminant transport in the subsurface. Learn how their class culminated in solving 
a real-world problem involving the Woburn groundwater contamination site (featured in the book and subsequent movie both entitled A Civil Action).

CEE Newsletter Image NSF and Faculty

NSF EAGER funds our faculty – Prof. Scott Hamshaw along with CEE faculty Donna Rizzo and Kristen Underwood, Byung Lee (Computer Science) and Melissa Pespeni (Biology) received an EAGER grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in response to the NSF 2026 Idea Machine Solicitation. The project, one of just 21 selected for funding nationally, addresses two of NSF’s Top 33 Ideas, Universal Similitude Across Scales, and Integrated Human-Machine Intelligence by focusing on the broad area of Earth Sciences. Freshwater resources face growing pressures from extreme events and land use changes, which result in varying trends in water quantity and quality at multiple scales (from small creeks to large rivers and from storm events to decadal cycles). To build a greater understanding of the impacts to water quality, this interdisciplinary research project will investigate trends in short-term and long-term water quality and streamflow data and possible similarities and associations to watershed attributes (e.g. land use, topography). The project takes a unique approach to this challenge by leveraging an interdisciplinary team including biologists and microbiologists from both UVM and collaborator U.S. Department of Energy, Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory. Results of the project will help further the research agenda of multi-scale environmental science research. 

CEE Newsletter Image Aultman-Hall


Farewell to Lisa Aultman-Hall – The University of Waterloo recruited Prof. Aultman-Hall to be the Chair of their Systems Design Engineering Department over the summer. We are very sad to see her move, but we wish her the very best in this new chapter in her career. Her new department will benefit from her significant experience as the founding director of our Transportation Research Center and Faculty Senate President in addition to her exceptional instructional, research, and mentoring capabilities. 

 

College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences
109 Votey Hall 33 Colchester Avenue
Burlington, VT 05405-0156

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