Students in the M.S. or Ph.D. program may select one area of concentration. Each student in the Ph.D. program must take a qualifying examination shortly after receiving the M.S. degree, or, if a student comes to Cornell with an M.S. degree, within nine months after arrival. Additional information on the M.S. and Ph.D. programs is available on request from the graduate field office. Environmental Processes (M.S. & Ph.D.) is concerned with the protection and management of the quality of the environment for the benefit of society. Degree programs emphasize biological, chemical, and physical phenomena and engineering principles, laboratory and computational skills, and their application to the analysis of relevant problems.
Environmental Fluid Mechanics and Hydrology (M.S. & Ph.D.) involves the study of fluid mechanics of the environment and the associated application to hydraulics, hydrology, coastal oceanography, and meteorology as related to the wet earth and atmosphere.
Environmental and Water Resources Systems Engineering (M.S. & Ph.D.) Research and instruction in this area address the development and application of scientific principles, economic theory, and mathematical techniques to the management and planning of public infrastructure and environmental and water resource systems. Research projects include evaluation of engineering projects, groundwater contaminant modeling and remediation optimization, statistical analysis of hydrologic processes, hydropower systems optimization, water supply systems management, water quality planning, remote sensing, risk analysis, river basin, and groundwater systems planning and operation, ecological systems management, sustainable development, and computer graphics-oriented decision support systems.
Structural Engineering (Ph.D. Only) includes, in addition to the conventional aspects of structural analysis and design, interests in computational mechanics, artificial intelligence, dynamics, and earthquake engineering, the behavior of thin steel structures, control of large-space structures, reliability, stochastic mechanics, natural disaster risk assessment and management, civil infrastructure systems, evaluation of structures and non-destructive testing, fracture mechanics, blast and impact loads, progressive collapse, and structural materials.
Transportation Systems Engineering (M.S. & Ph.D.) embraces policy, planning, design, and evaluation of transport systems and the relationships among transport supply and demand, land use, and regional development. The approach is multimodal and systems-oriented, it emphasizes the use of quantitative and analytical techniques of operations research and economics.
