Chair's message

Dear CEE alumni and friends,

Fall 2022 marks the first semester under the new Dean of the School of Engineering, Kyongbum Lee, and Tufts recently announced that Dr. Sunil Kumar will be appointed the 14th president of the University on July 1, 2023. We are all excited about the opportunities that these changes bring to Tufts.

We are engaged in conversation around curriculum and teaching, research, and community engagement. Civil and environmental engineering continues to be a discipline that brings people together around common topics, such as offshore wind and climate. Please enjoy our cover story on offshore wind, highlighting a collaborative project led by Professor Babak Moaveni. This NSF-funded project brings together faculty from Tufts and abroad to evaluate offshore wind turbines through monitoring and the use of digital twins. Many of our civil and environmental engineering students have strong engagement and commitment to the communities they work in as demonstrated by the stories on page five. With the addition of Greses Pérez to the faculty as the new McDonnell Family Assistant Professor of Engineering Education, we are not only thinking about how the geographic location influences a project, but also how the personal experience of an engineer can influence engineering.

In fact, a common theme across the many active research projects in the department is that our work is influenced both by geographic location and the communities that live there. We as civil and environmental engineers often seek collaborations with urban planners, economists, and both community and human health professionals.

In my sixth year as Department Chair, we will be focusing on research and curricular collaboration both within Tufts and across our broader engineering community. We are reaching out to the professional community in greater Boston and, I welcome conversations with our alumni community. Please don’t hesitate to reach out—we want to stay in touch and continue to enhance opportunities for connection for our current students. Let us know if you would like to come for a visit, participate on an alumni panel, or even add your name to an alumni mentoring pool.

Sincerely,
Laurie Gaskins Baise
Professor and Chair