News: CEE

To help the Ithaca Water Treatment Plant, engineering students have created a way to help predict concentrations of manganese in the city’s reservoir. Read more

A new study co-authored by Professor Patrick Reed warns about the potential unintended consequences for water, energy and food security in African river basins if global leaders fail to coordinate climate change mitigation policies. Read more

Patrick M. Reed, Joseph C. Ford Professor of Engineering of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering has been appointed as an editor for the American Geophysical Union’s Earth’s Future journal. Read more

A new Cornell-led study battled strains of yeast manipulated to release different toxins at tunable and controlled rates, finding that the strain with the stronger toxin can only defeat another if its initial invading population exceeds a critical frequency or size. Read more

Six faculty members have received the 2021 Cornell Engineering Research Excellence Award – the highest research honor given by the Ivy League’s top-ranked engineering college. Read more

By summer 2022, Cornell plans to drill a 10,000-foot hole to verify whether conditions underground will allow Earth Source Heat to warm campus and reduce the university’s carbon footprint. Read more

Harmful algal blooms (HABs) have been on the rise in New York State, and Cayuga Lake experienced more blooms than any other NY waterbody in 2020. In fact, 10% of the HABs reported to the NYS DEC statewide in 2020 (94 out of 930) were from Cayuga Lake. Algalblooms are triggered by the presence of excessive nutrients like phosphorus, which spur the growth of the naturally occurring microbe cyanobacteria that congregate into colonies, creating the appearance of “pea soup” at the surface of the water. However, not all algal blooms are classified as HABs: only some types of cyanobacteria produce... Read more

Long commute times and household crowding may be good predictors for a higher number of transmissible coronavirus cases in metropolitan settings, according to Cornell urban planning, architectural and public health researchers, in a July study published in the journal Buildings and Cities. Neighborhoods that had populations with predominantly longer commute times to work – from about 40 minutes to an hour – were more likely to become infectious disease hotspots, the research said. “We are trying to determine how the built environment influences coronavirus propagation,” said senior author... Read more

Concrete expert Ken Hover, Ph.D. ’84, professor in the College of Engineering’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, will play a key role on an expert team assembled by the federal government to investigate the June 24, 2021, partial collapse of the Champlain Towers South condominium in Surfside, Florida. The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on Aug. 25 announced the composition of the team, which will be led by Judith Mitrani-Reiser, associate chief of the Materials and Structural Systems Division in NIST’s Engineering Laboratory. Read more

Researchers say the future of transportation will be shaped by three “revolutions” – vehicle electrification, driverless cars and ride-sharing – that could result in fewer automobiles on the road, less fossil fuels extracted from the Earth and less pollution in the air. While the environmental gains may seem self-evident, the health benefits are difficult to quantify. Now for the first time, a Cornell-led team has used transdisciplinary systems modeling to calculate those health benefits in the United States. By 2050, these innovations could potentially slash petroleum consumption by 50% and... Read more