The course evaluation portal will be open for students to submit feedback for all courses, labs and tutorials on the following timeline:
Open: Wednesday November 25, 10:00 am
Close: Wednesday December 9, 11:59 pm
Make sure to submit your evaluations!
Changes to the Department of Civil Engineering Operations
Please note that in response to current circumstances regarding spread of the COVID-19 virus, Civil Engineering’s administrative staff are providing services remotely until further notice.
We will be responding to emails (preferred) and phone calls as quickly as possible during regular office hours: Monday to Friday, 8:30am – 4:30pm.
You are welcome to contact the following staff for support:
Joanne Gadawski, Administrator
gadawsj@mcmaster.ca
Morgan Shuker, Graduate Admininstrative Assistant
shukerm@mcmaster.ca
Shannon Krasulja, Undergraduate Admininstrative Assistant
langse@mcmaster.ca
Kent Wheeler, ADL Supervisor/Senior Lab Technician
wheelek@mcmaster.ca
Monica Han, Environmental Lab Technician
hanm7@mcmaster.ca
Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or concerns.
Thank you for your patience and take good care!
We have updated our website with resources available to you that you might find useful during these times and moving forward.
That includes our updated FAQs and technology resources for students.
Please have a look at https://www.eng.mcmaster.ca/civil/questions
We have also updated our Course Conflict Form and Engineering Permission Form and made them fillable for your convenience in submitting them virtually. You will find those forms on our Resources page.
Our Areas of Specialization
News

January 12, 2021 / Department News
New scholarship launched to support Black engineering students
The National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) McMaster Chapter has launched a new scholarship that will be awarded annually to Canadian Black students entering the Faculty of Engineering at McMaster.

December 22, 2020 / Department News
Top 10 McMaster Engineering stories to remember from 2020
It was a year of uniting in the face of unprecedented challenges. As we take time to reflect, here are some particularly memorable stories from this challenging and unpredictable year.

December 1, 2020 / Department News
Four students answer your research and entrepreneurship questions
Want to know more about student research or working with a startup but don’t know where to begin? Four McMaster Engineering students who attended last week’s Engineering Research & Entrepreneurship Fair can help.
Moustafa Naiem Awarded Vanier CGS Scholarship
The Department of Civil Engineering is proud to announce that Moustafa Naiem, PhD student has been awarded a Vanier CGS Scholarship. Named after Major-General Georges P. Vanier, the first francophone Governor General of Canada, the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship (Vanier CGS) is awarded to top ranking doctoral students who demonstrate academic excellence, research potential, and leadership.
Student Bio:
Moustafa Naiem is a graduate from the Structural Engineering department in Cairo University in Egypt, earning his B.Sc. degree in 2016 and graduating first-of-class. He worked as a Teaching Assistant while earning his Masters degree in Structural Topology Optimization and Steel Structures Design at the same university in 2018. Moustafa's passion went beyond academia - he was involved in reshaping the extra-curricular community at Cairo University during his undergraduate years. He was the co-founder and license holder for TEDxCairoUniversity for over three years, held a TEDx conference, and later became a mentor for the TEDx Community - and other organizations - in Egypt. At McMaster University, Moustafa has been developing measures to quantify critical infrastructure network resilience in cities under climate change-induced systemic (cascade) risks. His work has the potential to save billions of dollars.
Title of Research Proposal:
"A Resilient Canada in the Face of Climate Change-Induced Systemic Risks"
Lay Abstract of the proposed research:
In the past decades, Canada has witnessed a continuous increase in the frequency and magnitude of climate change-induced natural disasters. These events include droughts, floods, wildfires, and most recently, tornadoes. In 2016, climate change induced damage was estimated to be $8.6 billion in Canada, while in the United States of America, floods are becoming one of the costliest and highest in occurrence of all climate change induced hazards, costing an average of $8 billion dollars annually. Also, hurricanes such as hurricane Sandy cost over $67 billion dollars of total damage, while more recently. hurricane Florence resulted in an estimated damage of $5 billion so far. It is thus clear that the effect of climate change is already costing Canadians billions of dollars annually, at an increasing rate. Given the effect of these events on cities, there is yet to be a clear methodology to quantify a city’s resilience in the face of such hazards, and predict the losses, that also takes into account the interdependence of different infrastructure networks. Although there have been multiple frameworks in literature, none has been comprehensive for a large-scale city. As such, the proposed methodology introduces the utilization of several Machine Learning techniques to propose a 4-steps framework that quantifies city resilience under floods.
Amir Arsalan Jameei Awarded the Dr. Gunhard A.E. Oravas Memorial Scholarship
Amir Arsalan is a Ph.D. candidate in Civil Engineering under the supervision of Dr. Pietruszczak. His Ph.D. research is focused on computational mechanics of fluid-infiltrated porous media that examines the interactions of different phases and phenomena in reference to the coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical analysis of fully or partially saturated porous media. Other areas of his research include: different kinematics (viz. geometric nonlinearity and linearity), presence of discontinuities and material instabilities (strain localization and shear band evolution), and computational plasticity (material behaviour in the context of classical and finite-strain plasticity). He has been developing a new continuum approach for the study of fractures, faults, and deformation localization in different engineering applications that deal with fluid-infiltrated porous media. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the University of Guilan, Iran. His M.Sc. thesis introduced an innovative approach which obtains the limit loads of anisotropic soils through using the lower bound limit analysis in conjunction with finite elements and linear programming.
ABOUT DR. ORAVAS
Dr. Gunhard A.E. Oravas was a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Civil Engineering. His research interests
included Engineering Mechanics and Structural Engineering. He was an outstanding scholar and dedicated teacher
who greatly contributed to the quality of engineering education at McMaster University. This award is established from
a charitable donation by the beneficiary of his estate.
Civil Engineering Student Wins the 2020 MacDATA Graduate Fellowship
Pengxiao Zhou, a first-year PhD student in the Department of Civil Engineering has been awarded the 2020 MacDATA Graduate Fellowship.
The project will establish an integrated toolkit for the prediction of influent and effluent emerging contaminants at wastewater treatment plants. In the short-term, the research program will focus on the development of data preprocessing, feature selection, predictive model development, and uncertainty analysis approaches for the real-time influent and effluent emerging contaminant control. In the long-term, the generated knowledge might be extended to various environmental engineering fields and multiple regions internationally.
Pengxiao Zhou is working under the supervision of Dr. Zoe Li. His research focuses on implementing uncertainty analysis for wastewater simulation models. This MacDATA project is being co-supervised by Dr. Wenbo He and Dr. Zoe Li.
Congratulations Pengxiao Zhou!
WTS International 2019 Women in Transportation Award
Rasha Hassan, a second year M.A.Sc. student at the department, was the recipient of the prestigious WTS International 2019 Women in Transportation Award. The award was presented during the WTS International Annual General Meeting on October 24th, 2019 in Toronto. Working within the McMaster INTERFACE Institute, Rasha’s research is focused on Resilience Quantification and Systemic Risk Mitigation Strategies of Interdependent Transportation Networks, under the supervision of Dr. Wael El-Dakhakhni in collaboration with Drs. Moataz Mohamed and Mohamed Ezzeldin.
Spotlight
Alana Vandersluis, B.Eng.Scty. '16
(Civil Engineering) | Managing the Storm
Alyson King, B.Eng.Scty '18
(Civil Engineering) | Recognizing the Wrong Fit
Christina Vickery, B.Eng. '06
(Civil Engineering) | Building Bridges and Then Some
Christopher Crozier, B.Eng.Mgt. '90
(Civil Engineering) | Doing Business the Crozier Way
Christopher Gauthier, B.Eng.Mgt. '17 & Daniel Gonzalez, M.Eng.Design '16
(Civil Engineering), (Engineering Design) | Reaching for the Sky
Danielle DeRosa, BEng '10
(Civil Engineering)
David Heska, B.Eng.Mgt. '08
(Civil Engineering) | Building Around the World
Emily Reisman, B.Eng.Scty '02
(Civil Engineering) | Planning Urban Spaces
Emma O'Neill B.Eng.Scty '16
(Civil Engineering) | Seeing the Forest in the Trees
Gerry Forbes, B.Eng. '85, M.Eng. '93
(Civil Engineering), (Civil Engineering) | Engineering Safe Roads - and Safe Drivers
Gina Succi, B.Eng. '89
(Civil Engineering) | Manufacturing a Composite Solution for a Changing World
Ian Shrimpton, B.Eng. '92
(Civil Engineering) | The Human Side of the Building Business
Jacinta McNairn, B.Eng.Scty. '96
(Civil Engineering) | Pivoting in Search of a New Challenge
Jonathan Atkins, B.Eng. '87
(Civil Engineering) | The Business of Buildings
Jordan Vandervelde, B.Eng.Mgt. '07
(Civil Engineering) | Making everything old new again
Khaled Chebaro, B.Eng.Mgt. '10
(Electrical Engineering) | Harnessing the Sun’s Energy
Lindsay McCauley, B.Eng. '13
(Civil Engineering) | Off the Beaten Path to the Highway
Lisa Vespi, B.Eng.Scty. '08
(Civil Engineering) | Find a Mentor, Be a Mentor
Michael Sucharda, B.Eng.Mgt. '17
(Civil Engineering) | Transforming Toronto
Naomi Williams, BEngScty '14
Civil Engineering
Renata Tracey, BEng '13
Civil Engineering
Rob Bruggeman, B.Eng.Mgt. '94
(Civil Engineering) | Mining for Money
Rob Casasanta, B.Eng. '93
(Civil Engineering) | Engineering Success for the Family Business
Sandra Ketchen, M.Eng. '94
(Civil Engineering) | Civil Engineering Senior Vice-Present Operations at Saint Elizabeth
Suzanne Beale, B.Eng.Mgt. '88
(Civil Engineering) | Bridge Collapse Inspires Career