Department of Civil, Environmental and Ocean Engineering / Research Areas

Research Areas

Our Research

In the Department of Civil, Environmental and Ocean Engineering at Stevens, our faculty and students facilitate research in fields such as smart infrastructure, forecasting, experimental ship design, new environmental technologies and sustainability. We've categorized these research applications into four areas of interest:

  • Urban infrastructure systems

  • Environmental systems and sustainability

  • Coastal and oceanic systems

  • Cross-Disciplinary Research

Urban Infrastructure Systems

  • Combination of sensing networks and machine learning and analytics to enhance real time and long-term infrastructure deterioration prediction and maintenance decision making.

  • Decentralized and infrastructure-less systems for proactive disaster management and emergency operations in smart cities.

  • Resilient, sustainable and durable materials.

  • Geo Risk modeling for subsurface infrastructure.

  • A combination of earth observation using in situ and space borne sensors along with other sources like citizen science and IoT to improve the modeling of hydrological and meteorological events with a focus on urban/coastal areas.

Cross-disciplinary research is covered through the coastal resilience and construction research programs in the coastal and oceanic systems focus area, and through groundwater modeling in the sustainable environmental systems focus area.

Coastal and Oceanic Systems

  • Combination of physics-based simulations with machine learning to support prediction of low-probability/high-consequence coastal flooding

  • Development of broadly applicable approaches for flood modeling, risk assessment, climate change analysis, and benefit-cost analysis for flood risk reduction scenarios

  • Development of numerical models to support and improve coastal planning and design

  • Development of technologies to monitor coastal changes, improve design of shore protection technologies (living shorelines)

  • Leveraging progress in earth observation using in-situ and space-borne sensors along with other sources like citizen science and IoT to improve the modeling of hydrological and meteorological events with a focus on urban/coastal areas

  • Development of innovative technologies to design and deploy wave energy converters

  • Development of experimental techniques and computational tools to design, verify and validate hydrodynamics of advanced surface and subsurface vessels

  • Stabilization and control of supercavitating bodies

  • Dynamics and control of unmanned underwater vehicles

  • Development of bio-inspired swimming robots

  • Development of underwater vector sensing

Civil, environmental, and ocean engineering department chair Muhammad Hajj discusses the future of waves as a renewable energy source.

Applied Cross-disciplinary Research

A series of windmills in the ocean as part of an offshore wind farm.

Cross-Disciplinary Projects

Learn about some of our cross-disciplinary projects related to offshore wind farms below.