CEE

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Website Faculty

Course 1

Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE/Course 1) tackles urgent challenges—climate change, urbanization, resource scarcity, and infrastructure resilience.

Technical Skills

  • Systems modeling & optimization
  • Infrastructure & structural design
  • Environmental data analysis & sensing
  • Computational sustainability methods
  • Experimental design & field methods

Common Careers

  • Infrastructure & Structural Engineer
  • Climate & Sustainability Analyst
  • Transportation Systems Engineer
  • Environmental Consultant
  • Data Scientist (Infrastructure/Energy Systems)
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A scientist wearing a white lab coat and gloves works with equipment in a laboratory labeled BL2. Shelves, cabinets, and laboratory instruments are visible in the brightly lit room.
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About

MIT Civil and Environmental Engineering combines systems thinking, computing, and hands-on design to build solutions with real impact. Our students don’t just study—they engineer systems that shape the future. We combine scientific principles, engineering design, computing, and hands-on fieldwork to develop solutions with real-world impact for people and the planet.

Why Choose CEE?

Course 1 empowers you to engineer solutions to humanity’s most urgent challenges—climate change, sustainable cities, resilient infrastructure. Here’s what makes it unique:

  • Systems thinking meets hands-on impact. You’ll integrate scientific principles, computing, data analytics, and engineering design—then apply them in labs, fieldwork, and real-world projects. You don’t just study environmental and infrastructure systems; you explore, measure, and transform them.
  • Flexibility to follow your passion. Choose from three specialized cores and add computing pathways to create your ideal education. Whether you’re drawn to structural design, transportation networks, renewable energy, or environmental restoration, you’ll gain both deep expertise and broad systems perspective.
  • The urgency is real—and so is the opportunity. The world needs to build renewable energy infrastructure 8x faster. Cities must become sustainable and resilient. This is the decade that matters, and Course 1 prepares you to lead it. From climate tech startups to infrastructure consulting, from policy to research, you’ll have the skills to make meaningful impact at the scale the planet needs.

Discover why Course 1 is the perfect fit for students with diverse interests.

Faculty Spotlights

All CEE Faculty
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Saurabh Amin

Professor

MIT News
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Michael F. Howland

Assistant Professor

MIT News
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Darcy McRose

Assistant Professor

MIT News
  • Chair

    Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Career Development Professor

  • Department

    Civil and Environmental Engineering

  • Lab

    McRose Lab

  • Research area

    Bacterial physiology, genetics, genomics, mass spectrometry, geochemical measurements

CEE Stories

CEE Degrees

Undergraduate
  • Course 1-ENG Civil and Environmental Engineering
  • Course 1-12 Climate System Science and Engineering
Graduate
  • Master of Engineering (MEng)
  • Master of Science (SM)
  • Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
  • Doctor of Science (ScD)
  • Interdepartmental Master of Science in Transportation (MST) 
  • Joint Degree with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
  • PhD Program in Computational Science and Engineering
  • Master’s and MBA with Leaders for Global Operations (LGO)
A person wearing glasses and a black hoodie works on a laptop at a cluttered workstation in a laboratory setting, with technical equipment and cables on the desk.
A scientist wearing a white lab coat and gloves works with equipment in a laboratory labeled BL2. Shelves, cabinets, and laboratory instruments are visible in the brightly lit room.
Hands reaching into a tank of water to adjust a wire cage filled with seashells; the person is wearing a smartwatch.

Ask a CEE Engineer

New career paths require graduates who understand the science of climate change and who also possess the engineering and analytic tools. The Course 1–12 Climate System Science and Engineering degree program, jointly offered by the Departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) at MIT, prepares students to become leaders in the field, helping to accelerate high- impact, science-based solutions to solve global-scale environmental problems.

Class Highlights

  • 1.052 Advancing Mechanics and Materials via Machine Learning
  • 1.086 Physics and Engineering of Renewable Energy Systems
  • 1.091 Traveling Research Environmental eXperience (TREX)
  • 1.C03 Computational Methods for Engineering Sustainable Systems
  • 1.104 Sensing and Intelligent Systems

Alumni Highlights

Resources

The nexus of people, systems, and sustainability

  1. CEE Undergraduate Page
  2. CEE Undergraduate Brochure
  3. CEE Graduate Page