Georgia Institute of Technology School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Tech Environmental Engineering Professor Armistead “Ted” Russell has traveled the world, including China, India and Minneapolis, studying air quality and its impacts on urban life. He is also part of a team of scientists, policymakers and industrialists working with a U.S. National Science Foundation Sustainability Research Network to build better cities.

Two School of Civil and Environmental Engineering Ph.D. students have secured National Science Foundation fellowships, some of the most competitive and prestigious funding for the nation’s graduate students. Georgene Geary and Laura Mast join a long list of the brightest and most promising of the School’s students to win the funding. This year, NSF chose to support fewer than one in eight applicants.

The National Science Foundation has awarded Iris Tien $499,920 for a three-year project that will develop new computer models of infrastructure systems and the connections between them. The idea is to create a model that can be used for any infrastructure system — water, power, transportation, or communications, for example — and takes into account each component of the system as well as how the system interacts with other infrastructure.

How will we build the cities of the future in a sustainable way? A new National Science Foundation-funded research network will connect scientists at nine universities with infrastructure groups, public policy experts, and industry partners to reimagine cities. Georgia Tech will be an anchor of the $12 million network, which will be led by the University of Minnesota, and School of Civil and Environmental Engineering professor Ted Russell will serve as a co-director.