Welcome to Civil, Mining, Environmental and Architectural Engineering
The School of Civil, Mining Environmental and Architectural Engineering provides its students with the finest quality education in Civil, Mining, Environmental and Architectural Engineering. The students in our three undergraduate and coursework Masters degree programs are constantly exposed to cross-disciplinary interactions that make the depth and breadth of the academic experience in the School most unique and rewarding. The School currently employs sixteen full-time academic staff, and it has the highest proportion of staff with PhD’s (100%) amongst the top Australian Universities. Currently, the school has over 350 undergraduate students enrolled with excellent graduate outcomes including being regular recipients of national awards offered by Engineers Australia, the Australian Steel Institute and The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy. The School thrives on the quality of its academic and support staff who had won numerous teaching, research and general staff awards, and takes great pride in the quality of the graduates it produces. Some recent prestigious international awards received by academics include ASCE’s Middlebrooks and Canadian Geotechnical Society’s Robert Quigley awards, and the GN Alexander medal from the Institution of Engineers Australia, for outstanding research contributions.
The industrial boom, particularly in mining and civil infrastructure development, has seen rapid growth in high calibre undergraduate enrolments in these streams. Environmental engineering remains a national priority maintaining a steady number of enrolments, including the ever-popular Civil and Environmental combined degree. The revitalisation of essential subject strands such as in structural analysis and design, geomechanics, water resources, mine planning and design, and computations and numerical analysis with valuable input and participation from industry colleagues in our teaching programs has generated more challenging and exciting degree programs within the School. Our record in research continues to be strong and vibrant. With the creation of senior academic positions in Structural Design and Water Resources and the appointment of several new academics and full-time research personnel in Civil and Mining streams, the school has continuously enjoyed an exciting and challenging research outlook capturing a wider array of areas including seismic, offshore dynamics, natural disaster mitigation and climate change issues. This builds on the experience and outstanding record in winning competitive research grants and a commendable completion rate of doctoral students.
Greater interaction with industry colleagues in all disciplinary areas has created synergies with the inevitable result of industry-based grants in research through the Australian Research Council (ARC) Projects, the Cooperative Research Centre for Railway Innovation (CRC-Rail) and the Australian Coal Association Research Program (ACARP). Increased attempts by staff to secure blue sky funding have also been rewarded with success in the ARC-Discovery Projects. The research-intensive culture in the School is constantly associated with a healthy number of research students (enrolments and completions), an impressive rate of peer-reviewed publications, national and international awards for academic staff in teaching and research, significant infrastructure grants for modernisation of laboratories, and increased participation of international academics in research activities have maintained the reputation of the School as one of the best in the country.
While providing an excellent teaching and research environment within the School, a larger fraction of the academic staff is now involved in major consultancies and contract research, including modern design and performance verification of roads and rail tracks, ground improvement of reclaimed land for expansion of ports, development of floodplains, structural damage assessment, composite materials testing, steel structural design, dam maintenance, wastewater treatment and recycling, landslides risk assessment, offshore development and design of marine risers.
The School of Civil, Mining, Environmental and Architectural Engineering is geared to meet not only the future educational challenges for producing the topmost graduates in the country, but also to face the dramatically changing industrial trends and environmental changes. I thank all our School’s academic, technical and general staff, the past and present students and the local community for their concerted efforts in making our School for what it is today.
Professor Faisal Hai
Head of School
Civil, Mining Environmental and Architectural Engineering