Environmental Engineering

Description

In broadest terms, the field of Environmental Engineering is concerned with understanding the impacts of human activities on the natural environment and developing the scientific basis for solving, mitigating, or managing environmental problems caused by human activities.  The field emerged as a separate engineering discipline during the middle third of the 20^th century, in response to widespread public concern about water and air pollution and increasingly extensive environmental degradation.  However, its roots extend back to early efforts in public health engineering in the late 19^th century and to ancient times with regard to urban drinking water systems.

The Environmental Engineering program supports fundamental research and educational activities across the broad field it serves. The goal of this program is to encourage transformative research which applies scientific principles to minimize solid, liquid, and gaseous discharges into land, inland and coastal waters, and air that result from human activity, and to evaluate adverse impacts of these discharges on human health and environmental quality.  The program fosters cutting-edge research based on fundamental science and four types of engineering tools - - measurement, analysis, synthesis, and design.

Major areas of interest and activity in the program include:

• Developing innovative biological, chemical, and physical treatment processes to remove and degrade pollutants from water and air
• Measuring, modeling, and predicting the movement and fate of pollutants in the environment
• Developing and evaluating techniques to clean up polluted sites, such as landfills and contaminated aquifers, restore the quality of polluted water, air, and land resources and rehabilitate degraded ecosystems

Along with its sibling environmental programs (Environmental Technology, Environmental Sustainability, and Energy for Sustainability), the program fosters environmental sustainability through the development of techniques to minimize or avoid generating pollution.  Research may be directed toward improving the cost-effectiveness of pollution avoidance, as well as developing new principles for pollution avoidance technologies.  Research for new and improved sensors of environmental conditions and innovative waste reduction and recycling processes also are important components of this program.

Available Funding

The duration of unsolicited awards is generally one to three years.  The average annual award size for the program is $100,000.  Small equipment proposals up to $100,000 will also be considered and may be submitted during these windows.  Any proposal received outside the announced dates will be returned without review.

Key Dates

Deadline: September 15, 2009  -  at 5:00 pm submitter's local time.

More Info + Submissions

Agency: National Science Foundation (NSF)
Expires: September 15, 2009

Submissions for this opportunity are not handled by RI STAC or RI EPSCoR. Please follow the link below for more information on the opportunity and how to submit a response.

›› More Info  or  Submit a Response