Dear CEE Community and Friends,

I hope you had an enjoyable holiday break and IAP, and are excited to begin the 2022 Spring Semester. 2021 was a great year for CEE, and despite Omicron and COVID-19 surges, we are preparing for an even better 2022! 

This month, Prof. Tami Lieberman’s latest research is highlighted in the New York Times and Prof. Dennis McLaughlin talks with Curt Newton from the MIT Chalk Radio podcast about the complexities of teaching course 1.74 Land, Water, Food, and Climate. MIT students perform fieldwork research in Hawaii during IAP for course 1.091 and congratulations to Prof.Buyukozturk for being recognized as one of the top cited researchers in the Acoustics field.

We also share new research from the Plata Lab that found a dirt cheap solution to curb methane emissions and Professor Tal Cohen’s latest research explores growth within a confined space. 

Lastly, we welcome a new faculty member, Prof. César Terrer who is teaching an exciting new subject called The Terrestrial Cycle and Ecosystem Ecology. I look forward to this semester and wish you a successful start of the spring term. 

Sincerely,

Ali Jadbabaie

JR East Professor

Department Head, MIT Civil and Environmental Engineering

Core Faculty, Institute for Data, Systems, and Society

Prof. Tami Lieberman and colleagues examined the human skin and found that each pore had a single variety of Cutibacterium acnes bacteria living inside. “Each person’s skin had a unique combination of strains, but what surprised the researchers most was that each pore housed a single variety of C. acnes,” writes NYT reporter, Veronique Greenwood. 

When there isn't a simple answer

In a MIT Chalk Radio podcast episode, Prof. Dennis McLaughlin talks with guest host Curt Newton about how and why he makes space for scientific controversies in his engineering course about land, water, food, and climate. 

TREX travels to Hawaii

Fourteen students participated in TREX (Traveling Research Environmental Experience) course 1.091 offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP). Profs. David Des Marais and Jesse Kroll taught the course that brought students to the Leilani Estates at the site of the 2018 volcanic eruption to install low cost air quality sensors that will continue to monitor the CO² and particulate matter from the sulfur dioxide and other gases from the eruption years later.

Congratulations to Prof. Buyukozturk

Prof. Oral Buyukozturk is listed in the top 0.1% cited scientists among a subgroup of 32,178 top scientists world-wide within the Acoustics field of science and engineering for 2021. The selection of the subgroup is based on over 100,000 top scientists by c-score without self-citations or a percentile rank of 2% or above. The new list of recognition comes from the Mendeley metadata of citations analyzed by Elsevier and coordinated by Stanford University. Oral’s long-time research work in the Acoustics field includes wave propagation in nondestructive testing, sensing and monitoring of physical systems.

Researchers in the Plata Lab have come up with a promising approach to controlling methane emissions and removing it from the air, using an inexpensive and abundant type of clay called zeolite. 

Exploring growth within a confined space

New research from Prof. Tal Cohen’s group explores growth within a confined space and develops a framework to explain the mechanics of how growing bodies respond to confinement. 

In a new joint class between CEE and ChemE (1.096/10.496 ) taught by Profs. Desiree Plata and Brad Olsen, engineering students are helping to devise real-world solutions to climate change.

Assistant Professor César Terrer recently joined us from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Learn more about him and his research focus in our faculty spotlight.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Civil 

and Environmental Engineering

77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 1-290 Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 

(617) 253-7101

CEE.MIT.EDU