Infrastructure assessment, rehabilitation, and reconstruction

The United States has allowed much of its civil infrastructure to deteriorate due to age, increased demand on infrastructure systems, and inadequate investment. We must now reverse this decline and "rebuild America"" if the United States is to remain competitive. An important part of this effort is education; it is imperative that we train a new generation of civil engineers with the skills to provide effective solutions to infrastructure problems. With support from an NSF Combined Research Curriculum Development award, the Georgia Tech School of Civil and Environmental Engineering is developing an undergraduate civil engineering curriculum track to address this need Georgia Tech's existing track oriented civil engineering undergraduate curriculum provides an ideal environment for developing a new track that focuses on deterioration science, assessment technologies, renewal engineering, and project management. Using existing isolated courses as a foundation, the curriculum development effort will: introduce several new courses which supplement the existing courses; incorporate cognitive science and educational technologies into the curriculum; implement an educational assessment program to measure the effectiveness of the curriculum development effort; and disseminate the resulting curriculum to a wide audience via multimedia information servers such those on the World Wide Web and through continuing education courses to educate practicing engineers in the public and private sectors.