The Structural Engineering faculty includes world-class experts in wind and earthquake engineering, structural health monitoring and control, steel and concrete systems, risk mitigation, extreme loads, and stochastic analysis and optimization. Structural faculty focus on multiple and often interacting hazards (wind and waves, fires and earthquakes, blast and collapse).

The Environmental Fluid Dynamics faculty addresses flow and transport problems related to environmental flows, such as atmospheric and oceanic boundary layers, hurricane environments, tsunami propagation, coastal and inland inundation, groundwater pollution, CO2 sequestration, wind-structure interaction, wave-current interaction, urban sustainability, wind wave dynamics, sediment transport, forces on structures and architectural and urban fluid dynamics.

The Environmental Engineering group focuses on environmental chemistry and microbiology, especially as related to biofilms, bioreactors, membrane processes, environmental nanoscience and technology, water resources and the environment, the movement of chemicals and colloids through sediments, and the interaction of microbes with contaminants and mineral surfaces.

The Environmental Geosciences group has particularly strong research programs in environmental geochemistry, geomicrobiology, nanogeology, environmental actinide mineralogy and crystal chemistry, mantle petrology and large igneous provinces, origin and evolution of the Moon, and remote sensing of environmental conditions on Earth and other planetary surfaces.