Environmental Engineering Remains in the U.S. News Rankings Top 10

For the sixth year in a row, the Environmental Engineering program at Yale has made it into the top 10 of the U.S. News & World Report’s Graduate Engineering Rankings.

The rankings, which were released today, list the program as 9th best in the U.S. (tied with MIT). 

Jaehong Kim, professor and chair of Chemical & Environmental Engineering, said the fact that the program has been continuously ranked in the rankings' top 10 for the past few years is a testament to the wide-ranging impact that faculty and students have continued to have on the field. 

“The consistently high ranking is a reflection of the high quality of the research and publications that the program has produced,” he said. “It also reflects the leading roles that our faculty have in various large centers and initiatives, such as NAWI, NEWT, and SEARCH, as well as leadership positions in professional societies as editor-in-chief and associate editors in many leading journals of our field.”

Kim added that the fact that many graduates and postdoctoral associates hold academic positions throughout the U.S. and the world also significantly contributes to the program’s reputation. Numerous grad students and postdocs have also taken positions in government and industry, including those at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Proctor & Gamble, and the World Health Organization.

“Yale environmental engineering is continuously evolving to become even a better program,” he said. “For example, we seek to engage more with various new initiatives at Yale, such as Planetary Solutions to expand its research portfolio, as well as more closely collaborate with other units within Yale such as the School of Environment, School of Public Health, and School of Architecture, among others.”

Guided by Yale’s global perspective, the program began in 1998 as an interdisciplinary program within the Department of Chemical Engineering and was designed to focus on areas of major importance to the earth's future and build on institutional strengths in environmental, biological, and engineering sciences. In 2010, the department was renamed the Department of Chemical & Environmental Engineering to more accurately reflect the scope of the research and the degree offerings. The program now has six full-time faculty: Kim, Menachem Elimelech, Julie Zimmerman, Drew Gentner, Jordan Peccia, and John Fortner.

In this short time, the program has produced crucial research that has contributed significantly to the study of numerous issues, including water desalination and purification; environmental applications and implications of engineered nanomaterials; how energy production and use affects air quality; and how humans are exposed to bacteria and fungi in indoor settings.