The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Duke University aims to be an ideal incubator for education and research where faculty and students engineer solutions to problems relevant to the natural and built environment. Gaining a deep understanding of these problems and providing adequate solutions for them require the knowledge and analytical approaches of several disciplines. Therefore, the faculty consists of engineers and scientists with different backgrounds, and it is strongly committed to interacting with other engineers and scientists at, and outside of, Duke University. As part of this commitment, the Department provides a bridge between the Pratt School of Engineering and the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences. Although each scholar's research normally is situated within a discipline and one or more of the natural and built environmental media (i.e., air, soil, water, and/or materials), the Department fosters collaborative research and teaching, and its overall research and pedagogical profile is multidisciplinary

Hydrology and Fluid Dynamics

• John Albertson, Associate Professor - Environmental fluid mechanics, scaling in hydrology and boundary layer meteorology, use of computational fluid dynamics and field experiments to address issues of mass and energy exchange between the land and the atmosphere.

• Roni Avissar, W. H. Gardner, Jr. Professor - All aspects of land-atmosphere and air-sea interactions (modeling and experiments) at all scales, including atmospheric dynamics, regional and global climate changes, hydroclimatology, soil-plant-atmosphere relationships, material dispersion and diffusion, and ecosystem modeling.

• Ana Barros, Professor - Investigating the dynamics of water presence and water pathways in the environment. Understanding the physics of the hydrological cycle at all spatial and temporal scales, and applying this new knowledge to research and developing technologies for environmental assessment, prediction and control.

• Zbigniew J. Kabala, Associate Professor - Deterministic and stochastic modeling of water flow and contaminant transport in saturated and unsaturated heterogeneous porous media, theory of related measurements.

• Miguel A. Medina, Jr., Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies- Water resources, hydrologic and water quality mathematical modeling, integration of contaminant transport prediction models within a decision-analysis framework for risk assessment.

• Roger A. Pielke, Sr., Research Professor - Mesoscale meteorology through numerical modeling of the sea breeze and interaction among the mountains, oceans, boundary layer, and the free atmosphere

• Amilcare Porporato, Associate Professor - Ecohydrology and coupled dynamics of the soil-plant-atmosphere system; environmental fluid mechanics and turbulence dynamics; dynamical system approach and stochastic modeling of hydrological and biogeophysical processes; nonlinear time series analysis; flood forecasting.