Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering

Why Choose ISU's Environmental Engineering Graduate Program?

Environmental engineering firms often require employees to have a graduate degree in environmental engineering.

Iowa State's program prepares you to enter engineering and management roles in the environmental engineering industry and/or pursue a research/academic career.

  1. Our students gain hands-on, practical, and applicable experience developing innovative solutions for waste, wastewater, and hazardous waste problems.
  2. Our program is especially strong in wastewater treatment technologies (anaerobic and aerobic), site remediation, and recovery of useful products such as methane, hydrogen, and biochemicals.
  3. We specialize in developing innovative technologies such as the Temperature Phased Anaerobic Digestor (an R&D 100 Award Winner) and the Static Granular Bed Reactor for treating wastewater.
  4. Our research is supported by many public and private sponsors, including the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Water Environment Research Foundation, the American Water Works Association, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, state agencies, and industry.
  5. About half of our PhDs go into industry as consultants at companies such as Black & Veatch, Burns & McDonnell, Howard R Green, and CH2M Hill.
  6. Our graduates are prepared for academic careers. Our graduates are teaching at universities such as the University of Oklahoma, Georgia Tech, New Mexico State University, University of Nebraska, Washington University, South Dakota State University, and prestigious foreign universities.

Need More Reasons?

Our interdisciplinary approach introduces you to the working world and gives you a more complete picture of environmental engineering while grounding you in the fundamentals and basic principles.

We work with industry as well as students and faculty from other departments such as agricultural and biosystems engineering, agronomy, geoscience, microbiology, chemical engineering, and food sciences.