What Do Civil & Environmental Engineers Do?

Our standard of living depends on our civil infrastructure, a sophisticated system of buildings, bridges, dams, airports, transportation networks, water and power distribution systems, and environmental protection systems.

Civil and environmental engineers are responsible for designing, maintaining and enhancing our civil infrastructure. They help to sustain the living standards and quality of life of the population. Civil engineers are also master builders. They create structures that stand as timeless symbols of our civilization. Environmental engineers identify and design solutions for problems involving the environment. To do so, they have to be broadly educated and technically trained to address a wide spectrum of issues.

Eyuphan Koc

Smart, sustainable and resilient cities with functionalities drawn from engineered systems are the goal of Eyuphan Koc’s work, which focuses on designing holistic and convergent frameworks investigating the resilience of metropolis-scale
transportation systems.

A doctoral candidate advised by Lucio Soibelman, Fred Champion Estate Chair Professor in Engineering and chair of the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and
Environmental Engineering, Koc focuses on frameworks – achieved through collaborations across traditional research silos – that can bridge data, tools and
methods from fields as diverse as transportation systems analysis, natural hazard sciences, urban informatics and disaster economics.

Born and raised in Turkey, Koc received undergraduate degrees in civil engineering and industrial systems engineering from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul before coming to the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. At USC, he has earned a master’s degree in systems architecting and engineering and is currently working on another master’s degree in spatial data science.

During his doctoral studies, Koc has also worked on developing open data platforms for civil infrastructure systems designed to enable datadriven decision-making through linking and fusing diverse datasets from disparate sources. Pursuing interests in the broader fields of architecture, engineering and construction (AEC), he has spearheaded a new effort investigating “AEC in the 4.0 Era,” which delves into topics like the impacts of collaborative project delivery methods on innovation diffusion, emergent modes of software and hardware
development, and roles and responsibilities of higher education institutions to educate the AEC workforce of the future.

Koc has published three peer-reviewed journal articles, five peer-reviewed conference articles and a book chapter and has contributed to numerous research proposals. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the California Department of Transportation and the METRANS Transportation Center. Koc has also volunteered within USC Viterbi’s Mission Science K–12 outreach program.

Sustainable Development

Sustainability in the context of civil engineering targets long-term viability of natural resources and engineered civil systems.

Water Quality, Access, and Distribution

Providing an adequate supply of potable water, considering population growth and climate variability.

Disasters and Extreme Events

All aspects of an event, from a fundamental understanding of the physical processes controlling its evolution to the resulting environmental and social reaction.

Coupling of Complex Systems

Efforts aim to integrate research across the Sonny Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, as well with all outside disciplines that interact with civil systems.