Georgia Institute of Technology

At Georgia Tech, students are uniquely equipped to become the civil engineers leading the technological evolution of construction and infrastructure systems engineering.

We teach our students advanced technological approaches and methods and encourage them to research and develop new ones—always with a focus on the human dimension that enables them to understand how their ideas impact people and processes.

Civil engineering students who focus on Construction and Infrastructure Systems Engineering will participate in state-of-the-art fundamental and applied projects in the areas of information technology and systems, data and system modeling and visualization, automation and robotics, infrastructure sensors and sensor systems, risk analysis, and other advanced technology-based areas.

CISE Concentration

Undergraduate students wishing to focus their civil engineering education around construction and infrastructure may choose to pursue the CISE Concentration. This concentration requires students to take a set of courses in order to earn a special transcript designation upon graduation.

Within the CISE Concentration, students may select one of two tracks: Construction Engineering Management and Infrastructure Systems Engineering.

Infrastructure Systems Engineering focuses on the facilities required to serve a community and support thriving economies. These infrastructure systems include roadways, bridges, tunnels, water treatment facilities, electrical grids, telecommunications, and others that support the foundational elements that improve our quality of life.

Construction Engineering and Management professionals lead capital intensive construction including industrial, heavy civil, commercial and residential projects. Construction Engineers are capable of implementing innovative technologies for project success, designing and facilitating construction projects with sound engineering principles, and aligning a multitude of stakeholders.

Construction Engineering Management Track

Our program promotes critical thinking, facilitates experiential learning, and builds successful leaders in the Architectural/Engineering/Construction industry.

Students in the CEM track of the CISE Concentration have opportunities to conduct applied research with leading faculty and engage in capital-intensive urban construction projects in Atlanta, which is one of the strongest construction markets in the U.S.

Students benefit from excellent faculty with previous construction industry experience and an active network of industry supporters, including general contractors, owners, construction management consultants, government entities, subcontractors, engineering design firms, owners, material suppliers, and pre-fabrication companies.

Construction Engineering and Management (CEM)
In CEE Undergraduate CISE Concentration Requirements

Required: CEE 4100 Construction Engineering and Management
Complete three (3) from the following:

• CEE 4110 Construction Planning and Estimating
• CEE 4120 Construction Operations
• CEE 4130 Construction Safety and Health
• CEE 4140 BIM for Construction
• CEE 4150 Construction Management and Megaprojects
• CEE 4160 Smart and Sustainable Cities
• CEE 4803 Innovation and Entrepreneurship for Civil Systems

Infrastructure Systems Engineering Track

Infrastructure Systems Engineers design, coordinate, and maintain infrastructure which includes creating solutions for energy demands, water shortages and other global challenges. Our program promotes the creation and implementation of technology to develop infrastructure system solutions.

Undergraduate students who pursue the Infrastructure Systems Engineering Track of the Construction and Infrastructure Systems Engineering Concentration benefit significantly from the established active network with consultants, government entities and energy producing companies.

Students also have opportunities to conduct research with faculty members in ISE who are internationally recognized for their innovative contributions in transportation infrastructure, facility life-cycle assessment, socialenvironmental assessment, extreme event dynamics, and sustainable and resilient communities and infrastructure.

Infrastructure Systems Engineering (ISE)
In CEE Undergraduate CISE Concentration Requirements

Required: CEE 4100 Construction Engineering and Management
Complete three (3) from the following:

• CEE 4140 BIM for Construction
• CEE 4160 Smart and Sustainable Cities
• CEE 4803 Innovation and Entrepreneurship for Civil Systems
• CEE 8813 Data Analytics for CEE Systems
• CEE 8813 Sustainable Buildings

Graduate Program Tracks

Click below to learn more about the courses required for master's and doctoral students to specialize in construction and infrastructure engineering.

• M.S. Construction Engineering and Management Track

• M.S. Infrastructure Systems Engineering Track

• M.S. Computational Science & Engineering (CSE)-CISE Track​

*Ph.D. in Construction and Infrastructure Systems Engineering follows the general CEE requirement

Our Environmental Engineering program provides comprehensive educational and research opportunities in air, land, and water science and engineering. Our faculty members have a broad range of experience and expertise. They work in top-notch research facilities. They collaborate extensively with other engineering and science faculty across campus.

That means we attract the highest-caliber students from a variety of engineering and science backgrounds. And we design your master’s or Ph.D. program specifically for your professional goals.

Our program is a key component in campus-wide initiatives on biological engineering, bioscience and biotechnology, nanotechnology, materials science and technology, sustainable technology and development, environmental science and technology, and energy systems.

Key Research Areas:

• Air pollution: emissions, formation, transport, and deposition of aerosols
• Chemical and environmental multiphase transport processes
• Environmental and analytical chemistry
• Environmental biotechnology for bioremediation of contaminated soil, sediments and waters
• Hazardous substances in sediments, soils, waters and residues
• Nanotechnology in the environment
• Physical, chemical and biological processes influencing subsurface fate and transport of contaminants
• Physicochemical processes for water and wastewater treatment
• Sustainable technology and development

KEY RESEARCH PROJECTS

Our geosystems engineering program merges geotechnics, geophysics, geomechanics and geology.

We focus on the behavior of natural materials in engineered systems, encompassing traditional and emerging topics within the field — like advanced techniques for site and material characterization; constitutive and micromechanical modeling; natural and man-made hazard mitigation; engineered soils; biotechnology; geotechnical aspects of resource recovery; and foundation design, slope stability, and excavation support.

Our graduate students work with world-class faculty to conduct fundamental and applied research using analytical, numerical, and experimental methods. They also help us teach and participate in a wide range of professional development and social activities coordinated by the Georgia Tech Geotechnical Society.

Facilities

Geosystems instruction facilities, research groups and laboratories occupy more than 10,000 square feet of custom space in the Mason Building. The research groups include:

Geoenvironmental Engineering Group

In-Situ Testing Research Group

Rock and Fracture Mechanics Research Group

Our program’s academic and research activities have earned an international reputation for excellence — a reputation strengthened by an environment that fosters learning, discovery and creativity.

That world renown comes from our work in: creative use of advanced structural materials and composite systems to improve infrastructure; earthquake engineering; cladding effects on, and hybrid control of, the response of tall buildings to earthquakes and wind; steel connection design and behavior; and structural reliability and risk assessment.

Our students learn about — and conduct advance research on — structural analysis and design, the behavior of structural systems, earthquake engineering, engineering science and mechanics, high-performance materials, computer-aided engineering, risk and reliability, and intelligent engineering learning environments.

They are encouraged to form partnerships with each other and our faculty members to develop their skills and advance our profession. And we foster a multidisciplinary environment where we’re developing solutions to engineering problems of national and international importance.

Facilities

Our School is equipped with state-of-the-art laboratories and instruments for all aspects of modern structural engineering and structural mechanics and materials research. This includes:

• An 18,000-square-foot Structures and Materials Laboratory with an 8,000-square-foot strong floor, an L-shaped reaction wall with capacities of 100-300 kips, and two 30-ton-capacity cranes. More… (Learn about construction of this facility in STRUCTUREmag.)
• A broad range of universal testing machines, with capacity to 400 kips.
• Specialized facilities for mechanical testing with infrared thermography and photoelastic stress/strain analysis.
• A nondestructive evaluation/optics laboratory.
• A laser scanning confocal microscope.
• Numerous high-performance workstations equipped with state-of-the-art software in structural engineering and mechanics.

Transportation systems are the building blocks of modern society. Efficient and safe movement of information, people, goods and services ensures a thriving economy and improves our quality of life.

Our students study not only the efficient, safe design and operations of these critical linkages but also the systems’ influence on our travel behavior, how we design our communities and the quality of our environment. Working with our faculty of world-renowned scholars, graduate students also help improve the design and performance of our transportation systems as well as our understanding of how they fit into the environmental, institutional and social contexts of our society.

Students supplement their core technical transportation courses in urban planning, traffic engineering, highway and transit facility design, administration, and statistical analysis with interdisciplinary coursework from other units across Georgia Tech.

Facilities

Our research facilities include a unique traffic signal lab, an instrumented vehicle lab, and the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) laboratory.

Graduate students in Water Resources Engineering can expect a stimulating and diverse educational experience where you participate in innovative experimental, computational and modeling research that creates new knowledge.

Our program focuses on water, air, and land systems, with emphasis on the science and engineering applications of environmental transport processes and sustainable resource management. And our students and faculty members develop their research into new technologies that benefit engineering practice in fluid mechanics, hydraulics, hydrology, hydroclimatology, and water resources.

Facilities

The Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory includes a large constant-head tank, a 4.3 m wide sediment scour flume, a 24 m long tilting flume, a recirculating flume for cohesive sediment resuspension, a recirculating salt-water flume, a density-stratified towing tank, and a 24 m long wave tank. Instrumentation includes Acoustic Doppler Velocimetry (ADV), Laser Doppler Velocimetry (LDV), Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV), Laser-Induced Fluorescence (LIF), and three-dimensional visualization.

The Computational Laboratory includes a 16-node (64 CPUs) High Performance computing cluster and a number of Linux workstations. An eight-CPU, 32GB RAM visualization workstation was recently added. Our graduate students also have access to Georgia Tech's high performance computing systems and several European supercomputers.

Field instrumentation includes pressure transducers and ther mistors; a Campbell Scientific Eddy Covariance Tower System that directly measures sensible, latent and CO₂ fluxes between the terrestrial landscape through the atmosphere. This tower includes soil moisture probes, a rain gauge and dataloggers. Additional equipment includes an ISCO portable water sampler with ultrasonic level sensor and rain gauge, a depth-integrating suspended sediment sampler, a bed sediment sampler, a PPP Spectral Analyzer, and current meters.