Department snapshot: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Photos: M. Scott Brauer and Stuart Darsch This is part of an occasional series of features profiling academic departments at MIT. "This is a department with a very long history,” says Andrew Whittle, the head of MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE). That history, dating back to the Institute’s founding, is reflected in the department’s designation as Course 1 (of the many courses of study available to MIT students). But CEE is also a department that has changed significantly over time, as reflected in its renaming 20 years ago, when environmental engineering was added to its name.That expansion is not so unusual: Many other civil engineering departments have added an environmental component in recent years. And in a way, the addition of the environment as a specific focus in the department was not such a great change from its traditional purview, Whittle says. Water supply and sewage...