2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The Water Resources Management Department at XXXX University, one of the Historically Black Universities and Colleges, offers Environmental Engineering (ENE) and Water Resources Management (WRM) programs at the undergraduate level. While the environmental engineering program is small, it significantly impacted the African American population in environmental engineering education by being the first ABET-accredited environmental engineering program in an HBCU and continuously producing minority environmental engineers to the workforce. In the past, the ENE program educated, trained, and prepared students for the traditional environmental engineering industries, such as water and wastewater treatment, air quality management, and solid waste management, via course works in these topics.
In the past decade, the ENE program identified the transportation industry as a niche industry for which the workforce program can produce environmental engineers. The ENE faculty has enhanced the program with transportation industry-related coursework, research and internships with the support of the Department of Transportation funding and collaborators. These activities have been implemented from the recruitment phase to the graduation phase.
The ENE curriculum includes environmental engineering courses, and the ENE majors can minor in WRM too. Except for the Water Transportation elective in WRM, neither of the program coursework covers the core transportation courses. However, these programs have enhanced their course components in water, air, noise, and solid waste management to address pertinent transportation-related topics. These topics include greenhouse gas emissions, noise and energy related to transportation, highway culvert design, water quality, and garbage collection problems.
Since 2009 the department has collaborated with other institutions to receive funding from the Department of Transportation for transportation research. While the rest of the consortium institutions have focused on research in the core transportation areas, such as pavement design, traffic congestion, and connected and autonomous vehicles, XXXX University focused on greenhouse and criteria pollution, traffic noise modeling, and greenhouse gas emission and cost comparative study pre-COVID 19 and COVID 19 period. These opportunities helped build facility capabilities and paid student undergraduate research and internships in these areas and internships. The students were able to participate in their research at the conferences. In addition, they also participated as Minor Transportation Scholars.
In addition to the air quality and energy research, the ENE faculty are involved in relevant professional development activities such as MOVES training and as a part of the Transportation Research Board Friends of the Air Quality and Hydrology and Hydraulics committees.
From 2008 to 2018, the department and the first author had been involved in the four-week Summer Transportation programs for high school students to recruit the students for the environmental engineering programs.
In the future, the ENE program intends to further strengthen the transportation components by including environmental equity and justice issues.