News

Four Texas universities, led by The University of Texas at Austin, have been awarded a grant to establish a new research center to study the risks and impacts of flooding and air pollution in a fast-growing part of Southeast Texas. The scientists will focus on the interactions between these two key issues, as well as their potential acceleration under various climate scenarios.

The Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Department is once again in the top 10 undergraduate programs nationally according to the latest U.S. News and World Report rankings. Civil Engineering has ranked No.5, and Environmental Engineering is No.7.

With rising demand and dwindling supply, water is perhaps the earth’s most critical natural resource. Contaminated water from energy-related activities is both an enormous burden and an exciting untapped opportunity.

University of Texas Professor Chandra Bhat, and students Aupal Mondal and Katherine E. Asmussen were announced as the winners of the prestigiou Pyke Johnson Award for their paper, "The Influence of Mode Use on Level of Satisfaction with Daily Travel Routine: A Focus on Automobile Driving in the United States."

The American Meteorological Society recognizes Dev Niyogi as the 2023 Lansberg Award winner.

Misztal's project, entitled “Spatiotemporal Investigation of Urban Pollution and Air Quality (SPING-UP-AQ)", involves testing air quality in Texas.

Lance Manuel was selected by the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board for a Fulbright-Nehru Specialist Grant to work on a program to assist early-career researchers and faculty at a small rural engineering college located in a village in Southern India as they navigate academic advancement expectations.  He has been undertaking this work over a few weeks in July and August of 2022.

The Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) has named Dr. Chandra Bhat the recipient of the 2022 Theodore M. Matson Memorial Award. This award was established in 1957 to recognize an individual who has made outstanding contributions to the practice and advancement of traffic engineering.

In recent years, more vehicles include partially autonomous driving features, such as blind spot detectors, automatic braking and lane sensing, that are said to increase safety. However, a recent study by Chandra Bhat and other researchers from The University of Texas at Austin finds that some of that safety benefit may be offset by people driving more, thereby clogging up roads and exposing themselves to more potential crashes.

As heat waves hit almost every corner of the globe, Dr. William O’Brien and other members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is calling attention to water resources and climate change in a uniquely expressive way.