Chair's message
Dear CEE alumni and friends,
We are well into the Fall 2025 semester, and the campus is busy with student energy, including a well-attended MOLES field trip to MASSDOT’s 1-90/I-95 Newton-Weston Design Build Project and annual junior year student laboratories in the Anderson Hall basement related to water and soils. This fall we welcomed a new class of undergraduates to the department including 38 students across the undergraduate degree programs in the Class of 2028. This is the largest class in a few years which speaks to the health of the department. We also launched a new undergraduate minor in Public Health Engineering and renamed our undergraduate degree in environmental health to a B.S.E. in Public Health Engineering.
Around campus and in the department, we are engaged in conversation around how AI is impacting curriculum, teaching, research, and community engagement. In CEE, all faculty have embraced the challenge and are bringing creative approaches into the classroom, such as using chat bots to stand in for community engagement in Professor and Berger Chair Farshid Vahedifard’s Resilient and Equitable Infrastructure class or evaluating the use of AI in truss design in Professor Masoud Sanayei’s Structural Analysis class. Across the board, students and faculty are exploring how to engage with AI in learning and engineering.
CEE faculty had a productive year in research, bringing in new projects related to health and infrastructure. CEE faculty and students are actively engaged in projects related to resilience and sustainability of energy and water infrastructure, quantification and identification of health impacts, and engineering education. These projects have resulted in field work, conference attendance and presentation, and award-winning publications. Read on to discover some highlights from the past year including published work from undergraduate students! I am so proud of the work done by our community members. In my ninth and final year as department chair, we will be talking about next steps for CEE so that the next department chair will be able to hit the ground running.
Sincerely,
Laurie Gaskins Baise
Professor and Chair