Faculty

Chair Welcome

Welcome to the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering

Welcome to the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering (CvEEN) at the University of Utah! As the Chair of this distinguished department, I am honored to lead a team of innovative faculty and researchers, dedicated staff, and ambitious students who are committed to excellence in education, innovative research, and impactful service to address society's global needs, current and future, for resilient, sustainable, and intelligent infrastructure systems. Read more→

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Dr. Tong Qiu

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Michael Barber

Professor

Dr. Michael Barber is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CvEEN) at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah. He has over 30 years of experience in hydrology and water resources working in academics and in private consulting. His responsibilities include teaching water-related classes, advising and supervising undergraduate and graduate students, and mentoring and publishing technical papers and reports. Dr. Barber's research has field investigations and numerical modeling studies of water, nutrients, and primary productivity in rivers and lakes with focus on estimating consumptive use requirements, stream¬groundwater interaction, climate change implications, and human adaptation. He is currently working on an investigation of climate change and land development impacts on water quantity and quality, using remote sensing techniques to determine crop water requirements at the watershed scale, and improving water security in Pakistan. Michael is very involved in multi-stakeholder projects where consensus building and information transfer are vital components of the research.

Roshina Babu

Assistant Professor, Lecturer

Dr. Roshina Babu is an Assistant Professor (Lecturer) in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. She has about ten years of experience teaching undergraduate courses in Engineering Mechanics, Strength of Materials, and Structural Analysis. Her research interests are biomimetic structures, groundwater management in small islands, saltwater intrusion in coastal aquifers, and managed aquifer recharge. In addition to research interests, Dr. Babu is passionate about developing experiential learning projects for undergraduate students.

Steven Bartlett

Associate Professor

Dr. Bartlett is a licensed professional engineer in the State of Utah and has 25 years of design and construction experience working with Westinghouse, Woodward-Clyde Consultants, Utah Department of Transportation Research Division and the University of Utah. Currently, he is an associate professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Utah, but is currently teaching at the University of Utah Asia Campus. His specialty areas are in geotechnical earthquake engineering, light-weight embankment construction (EPS Geofoam), foundation stabilization, geotechnical instrumentation, strong ground motion monitoring and assessment and mapping of liquefaction-induced ground failure. His research interests are in the development, design and long-term performance monitoring of construction technologies for transportation systems and infrastructure with an emphasis on rapid construction techniques, improving seismic resiliency and risk and vulnerability assessments. His teaching interests include computer aided design, soil dynamics and intermediate civil environmental engineering.

Christian Brockmann

Professor, Lecturer

Dr. Brockmann is a Professor (Lecturer) in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering with teaching interests in Construction Engineering, Management, and Economics. He brings a wide range of professional experience to the classroom having worked for contractors and owners as well as a consultant and a legal expert. He was engaged in projects on four continents spanning a period of 40 years; much of the time he directed infrastructure megaprojects, including the design and construction of the world’s longest bridge. Parallel to his professional career, he enjoyed teaching for 22 year as Professor for Construction Management and Economics at the University of Applied Sciences Bremen, Germany. Multiple invitations as Visiting Professor to the Asian Institute of Technology (Thailand), Stanford University (USA), and the University of Reading (UK) allowed him to gather understanding in teaching student populations. His major research interests are the management of megaprojects and construction economics.

Steven Burian

Adjunct Professor

Edward Cazalas

Assistant Professor

Dr. Edward Cazalas is an Assistant Professor in the Nuclear Engineering Program within the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Utah. His research group (CAZ-RAD) works to understand the physics and engineering of nuclear and radiation interactions, tools, and instruments for radiation detector development, advancement of the field of dosimetry, and investigation of radiation effects. This work goes into application by supporting the fields of nuclear engineering, radiation and nuclear physics, nuclear security, and radiation damage and hardness effects in electronics.

Janice Chambers

Assoc. Professor Emeritus

  • Office: Off-Campus

Craig Coburn

Adjunct Assoc. Professor

Travis Davis

Associate Instructor

No'am Dvory

Research Assistant Professor

Dr. Dvory’s research focuses on fracture dynamics and reservoir integrity. His work spans from studying nano-scale fracture surface evolution due to chemical and thermal effects to field-scale fracture propagation driven by stress changes and viscoplastic processes and ultimately to reservoir-scale poroelastic phenomena. He is also actively engaged in developing both physics-based and statistical models for predicting, managing, and mitigating seismic risks.

David Eckhoff

Professor Emeritus

Ramesh Goel

Professor

Dr. Ramesh Goel is an environmental professor in the CVEEN department. His teaching interests are courses that address environmental engineering and science related issues, such as: environmental engineering I, the environmental lab and bio process design. Dr. Goel’s research is focused on the application “omics” the importance of bacteriophages in engineer bioreactors and natural ecosystems, nutrient recovery from urban rest streams, as well as many other topics addressing the environmental and water. He encourages all CVEEN students to “work hard and to respect one another.”

Andy Hong

Professor

Dr. Andy Hong teaches environmental engineering courses along with engineering economics and statistics. He seeks to apply innovative processes in contaminant issues, particularly for treatment of contaminated water, soil, and sediment, for which 10 US patents have been issued. Dr. Hong is currently working on applications of micro/nanobubbles for harmful algal blooms, bioenergy, and viral disinfection.

Luis Ibarra

Associate Professor

Dr. Luis Ibarra came to the U from Southwest Research Institute where he used finite element simulations and experimental tests to evaluate the mechanical response of engineered barriers for high-level radioactive waste. Dr. Ibarra is also registered professional engineer in Texas. His current research includes seismic performance of nuclear storage containers, seismic performance of Buckling Restrained Brace (BRB) frames, implementation of nonlinear dynamic capabilities in MOOSE software, and probabilistic risk assessment of nuclear components. His teaching interests include steel design, advanced topics, and structure loads and analysis.

Glenn Johnson

Adjunct Associate Professor

Jerod Johnson

Adjunct Asst. Professor

Ryan Johnson

Assistant Professor

Dr. Ryan Johnson is an Assistant Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering. His teaching interests are courses to generate the next generation of water resource scientists and operators, such as Hydraulics. Dr. Johnson’s research focuses on large-scale methods to advance operational hydrology, such as improving the modeling of snow-driven hydrological systems critical to forecasting western US water supply and developing novel applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning to guide water resources management decision-making to droughts, floods, and a changing climate. He encourages all Civil and Environmental Engineering students to learn a coding language and build long-lasting collaborative relationships.

Evert Lawton

Professor Emeritus

Joshua Lenart

Associate Instructor

Dr. Joshua Lenart is an Associate Instructor with the Communication, Leadership, Ethics, and Research (CLEAR) Program at the University of Utah where he also received his Ph.D. in Writing and Rhetoric Studies and now teaches technical communication for the College of Engineering. His teaching expertise is in technical and professional communications, specifically: administrative and organizational writing, grant writing, teambuilding, and strategic communications. His research expertise focuses on natural resource management policy as it relates to landscape-scale impacts on wildlife habitat, hydrologic systems, community resilience, adaptation planning, and long-term land use conservation. His advice to CVEEN students is “Don’t view your education as simply training on your way to a job; instead use your time to school to learn and think broadly about your social connections and your place in the natural world. You have the rest of your life to work; take time in college to appreciate and enjoy being in college.”

Chenxi (Dylan) Liu

Assistant Professor

Dr. Chenxi (Dylan) Liu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He is passionate about customizing situation-aware machine intelligence to establish a connected and autonomous transportation system. More specifically, his research is focused on using AI/ML methods including cooperative traffic sensing technologies, cyber-physical cooperation, distributed computing to address transportation resilience, safety, equity, and related challenges. He encourages every CVEEN student to learn the basic knowledge about ML and AI and learn to how to apply them to real-world applications.

Xiaoyue Liu

Associate Professor

Dr. Xiaoyue (Cathy) Liu is passionate about programming, computational analysis, and urban informatics. Dr. Liu's teaching and research is focused on sustainable transportation systems including public transit, managed lanes, large-scale transportation system modeling and simulation, GIS-based infrastructure asset management, network complexity of social sciences, and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). She encourages all CVEEN students to "Engage in research activities with faculty, especially with the transportation group. There is a lot of research readily available and applied."

Nikola Markovic

Assistant Professor

Dr. Nikola Markovic is currently working with his students to apply operations research and data science to analyze and improve transportation systems, as well as looking at the value of information in network models. Dr. Markovic's teaching interests include transportation methods and probability and statistics. His research focus is operations research and data science in transportation. Dr. Markovic encourages CVEEN students to "take as many programming and data science courses as you possibly can."

Tara Mastren

Assistant Professor

Dr. Tara Mastren is a nuclear assistant professor in the CVEEN department. Her teaching and research interests are in nuclear medicine, which targets radiotherapy for the treatment of cancer and Alzheimer’s, lanthanide and actinide chemistry, and isotope production. Dr. Mastren tells all of our CVEEN students, “if you want to go into research science, get as much lab experience as possible.”

Luther McDonald

Adjunt Professor

Prof. McDonald joined Utah in January 2014 as an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Nuclear Engineering Program. McDonald has successfully steered the development of a leading environmental radiochemistry laboratory, mentoring over thirty students, and managing $5 M in research funding. McDonald was also the University Director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Nuclear Forensics Undergraduate Summer School in 2017 and 2018. Before joining Utah, McDonald performed a post-doctoral fellowship at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Environmental Radiochemistry and worked as a visiting scientist at the Commissariat à l’énergie atomique in Saclay, France, after completing his Ph.D. at Washington State University in Radiochemistry. He served as the elected Secretary of the American Chemical Society’s Division of Nuclear Chemistry and Technology from 2013 – 2016 and was named one of Forbes 30 under 30 in Science in 2017. He encourages CVEEN students to, "Get research experience and enroll in and internship."

John McLennan

Adjunct Professor

Brian McPherson

Professor

Dr. McPherson is the USTAR Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Utah. Technical focus areas include groundwater and reservoir simulation, multiphase flow analysis and simulation, rock deformation, and subsurface chemically reactive transport analysis and simulation. McPherson and his research group maintain a high pressure/high temperature laboratory capable of combined multiphase flow and rock mechanical response experimentation and are currently conducting flow tests to quantify potential mechanical, chemical and hydrologic changes to rocks during CO2 sequestration.

Juan Medina

Research Associate Professor

Dr. Juan Medina is a research associate professor for the CVEEN department. Dr. Medina currently manages and works with our graduate students in our department transportation lab. His research is focused on application of data-driven and computing-based techniques to integrate and analyze large and heterogeneous datasets with the objective of improving transportation operations and safety, deployment and harvesting of web-based resources through online applications and services, and exploration of innovative datasets and data collection techniques to enhance our understanding of traffic operations and safety issues. Dr. Medina’s current research projects are working on leading the Crash Data Initiative, a long-term effort to operate a management system that hosts, maintains, and provide online services and analytics related to Utah’s crash data, conducting research to identify and develop alternative methods for roadway safety analysis using surrogate measures, and quantifying the effects of events in transportation facilities (e.g. crashes) by integrating high-resolution traffic data from crashes, traffic sensors, and video feeds. Dr. Medina encourages CVEEN students to “Be consistent and spend time building your very own set of skills looking forward to your ideal career path. In all cases, improve your computer programming skills in a language of your choice.”

Kami Mohammadi

Assistant Professor

Dr. Kami Mohammadi is an Assistant Professor of Geotechnical Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. His research interests include the interface of computational geomechanics and dynamics, engineering seismology, and geo-data analytics. He applies his research in hazard assessment and mitigation, analysis and design of major infrastructure, non-invasive subsurface characterization, and large-scale monitoring of geo-structures. Kami teaches courses in mechanics and dynamics of geo-materials, computational geomechanics, and wave propagation in heterogeneous media.

Nathan Moodie

Research Asst. Professor

Dr. Nathan Moodie is a Research Assistant Professor in the Civil & Environmental Engineering Department and affiliated with the Energy & Geoscience Institute (EGI) at the University of Utah. His expertise covers many aspects of multi-phase, multi-physics numerical simulations, with a focus on geologic carbon storage under multiple scenarios. He specializes in the application of relative permeability and capillary pressure to numerical modeling with an emphasis on improving methods for leveraging laboratory data to improve model resolution. In conjunction with this, he is currently collaborating on several DOE-sponsored research projects in the western US.

Joseph Moore

Research Professor

Chris Pantelides

Professor - ASCE Fellow

Dr. Chris Pantelides is a structural professor in the CVEEN department. His teaching interests are structural earthquake engineering. He spends a lot of time with his graduate students working on research in the structure’s lab. Dr. Pantelides research interests include: seismic retrofit using conventional systems and FRP composites, supplemental damping systems, seismic resilience of buildings and bridges, mass timber buildings and shake table testing.

Christine Pomeroy

Associate Professor, Lecturer

Dr. Christine Pomeroy teaching interests are hydraulics, open channel flow, stormwater management and design, water distribution system analysis, and urban watershed management. She has more than 15 years of academic and consulting experience in stormwater management, watershed management, permitting and compliance, modeling, GIS applications in water resources, hydraulics and hydrology. Dr. Pomeroy's expertise and research are focused on urban water engineering & sustainability, stormwater management, watershed management, permitting and compliance, modeling, GIS applications in water resources, hydraulic and hydrology. Dr. Pomeroy encourages CVEEN students to "focus on learning, the grades will be what they grades will be" and "find classmates to study with--it'll enhance your understanding of the material."

R Porter

Adjunct Assoc. Professor

  • Office: Off-Campus

Tong Qiu

Department Chair & Professor

Dr. Tong Qiu is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Utah. His research interests include soil dynamics, fluid flow through porous media, landslides, granular flow, numerical modeling of geosystems, and the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to various geotechnical engineering problems. His research has been supported by diverse sources, including federal agencies (e.g., NSF, FHWA, DOS, FRA, and SERDP), state agencies (e.g., PennDOT, State Police, and Ben Franklin Foundation), industries (e.g., Google, Tensar International Corporation, Alpine Equipment LLC, and Mission Critical Solutions), and DOT University Transportation Center. He is an elected ASCE Fellow.

Abbas Rashidi

Associate Professor

Abbas Rashidi, PhD, CPC, is Assistant Professor of Construction Engineering at the University of Utah. His educational background includes MS and PhD degrees in Civil and Environmental Engineering (Tehran Polytechnic, 2004; and Georgia Tech, 2014) and an MS degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering (Georgia Tech, 2013). His dual background in civil engineering, as well as electrical and computer engineering, has enabled him to conduct multidisciplinary research and to implement electrical engineering tools and computational techniques to solve complex civil engineering problems. In particular, he is interested in applying audio/image/video processing techniques to analyze and model complex civil engineering systems. He currently serves as a member of several professional committees including the Signal Processing in Acoustics Committee of the Acoustical Society of America, and the Data Sensing and Analysis (DSA) Committee of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). In addition, he is the associate editor and a member of the editorial board of two ASCE journals: ASCE Journal of Construction Engineering and Management and ASCE Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities.

Larry Reaveley

Professor Emeritus

Pedro Romero

Associate Professor

Dr. Pedro Romero teaching interests include construction materials, pavement design and pavement maintenance, but also feels comfortable in the structures, geotechnical and transportation areas. His research expertise and interests deal with the use of materials in civil engineering applications (asphalt, concrete, composites); specifically he is interested in how the material properties affect the durability of structures. His research projects deal with mechanical testing, mechanics of materials including visco-elasticity and plasticity, design and construction of pavements using mechanistic methods, and maintenance and rehabilitation of infrastructure systems. He is a recognized expert in the area of asphalt materials and mechanical testing. Dr. Romero encourages CVEEN students to "find balance in your life" while going to school. 

Peter Rose

Research Professor

Shahrzad Roshankhah

Assistant Professor

Dr. Shahrzad Roshankhah is an Assistant Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Her research interests include the evolution in the physical properties of natural and engineered porous materials upon heat and mass exchange, particularly, under extreme conditions (e.g., high stress, high fluid pressure, and high temperature). Shahrzad studies the involved multi-physics and multi-scale phenomena through laboratory experimental and numerical modeling, where she utilizes state-of-the-art laboratory monitoring and numerical simulation techniques. Her objective is to design sustainable geo-energy and geo-environmental infrastructure, such as enhanced geothermal energy, unconventional fossil energy, and thermal energy geo-storage systems. Shahrzad recommends her students to follow their hearts in their journey of making the world a better place to live in!

M. Scott Shea

Associate Instructor

Michael Simpson

Adjunct Professor

Glenn Sjoden

Professor & UNEP Director

Dr. Glenn Sjoden’s outlook is “If an engineering system can be modeled, we can perform the research & development to solve, design, and optimize it!” He is excited to apply his over three decades of combined experience as a military officer, professor, consultant, and chief scientist as the new College of Engineering Energy Solutions Presidential Endowed Chair. Dr. Sjoden’s teaching interests are numerical methods and nuclear physics. As an expert in radiation transport and nuclear reactor physics, “understanding where and how radiation interacts” in any engineering application is key. In addition, Glenn also pursues development and application of numerical algorithms for modeling novel applications, integrated engineering design, and physics-based optimization employing his proficiency in High Performance Computing (HPC). He encourages CVEEN students to "map out your degree plan as soon as you can. Once you do that, take the electives you’re most interested in."

Kevin Smith

Associate Instructor

Rasoul Sorkhabi

Research Professor

Jennifer Weidhaas

Associate Professor

Dr. Weidhaas’ research and teaching interests include environmental engineering with a particular emphasis on biological processes and the fate and transport of contaminants and microorganisms in the environment. Her recent projects include evaluation of emerging contaminants in environmental systems, industrial wastewater treatment, waterborne pathogen detection and wastewater reuse. She also conducts research in the area of environmental microbiology including microbial source tracking, development of massively parallel pathogen detection methods, and evaluation of microorganism fate in environmental systems.

Ting Xiao

Research Asst. Professor

Dr. Ting Xiao is a research assistant professor at the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. Her research interests include subsurface reactive transport simulations, geologic carbon dioxide storage, risk/uncertainty assessment, and underground sources of drinking water quality. She is currently working on feasibility assessment and public engagement for the development of carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) hubs.

Xuan Zhu

Assistant Professor

Dr. Xuan (Peter) Zhu is an assistant professor in the Civil & Environmental Engineering Department. He is currently teaching courses Advanced Topics 6920 and 7920. Dr. Zhu’s research is focused on weather conditions and how that affects transportation. He is currently working on finding the internal defects of railroad tracks, stress levels of tracks and the most effective and efficient way to manage tracks. Dr. Zhu encourages all CVEEN students to “speak with your professors and become their friends”.