Fernando Sansò DOCTORAL PROGRAM IN ENvIRONMENTAL AND INfRAsTRuCTuREs ENGINEERING

The Doctorate in Environmental and Infrastructure Engineering has been formed in the academic year 2008/2009 as a result of an effort of the previous departmental doctorates to merge their subjects in a culturally unified vision, where the environment is the common background. In this sense water, its physical behaviour in a natural and in a built context, is a primary constituent of the environment and it is therefore object of investigation of different groups of research looking at theoretical and numerical fluidynamic aspects, to the interaction water-solid earth, describing the flow of water in a natural catchment and projecting civil constructions to properly and sustainably exploit this fundamental resource. Next to this item is the study of the geological setting in which water flows and with which it interacts, including the creation and possible mitigation of hydrological risks. Indeed water is one of the basic vehicles through which pollution created by human activity is spread in nature and preserving its quality is one of the fundamental issues of environmental engineering. Not to be forgotten, the same problem has to be confronted with air and its quality, as well as with soil pollution due to solid pollutants, and solid waste management. One activity which is then interacting with such problems, is that of transportation infrastructures, construction and management, including traffic risks and regulation. Finally all the environmental problems treated are in fact seated on the surface of the earth or in its immediate surrounding, above and below. Such items as earth observation from different platforms, surveying and monitoring the earth surface by various sensors, are therefore just natural in the training of scientists for the environment. All that is reflected in the structure of the doctorate which is organized over 5 research areas, namely: Hydraulic engineering, Hydrology, hydraulic structures, water resources and coastal engineering, Environmental technologies, Transport infrastructures, Geomatics. Accordingly the PhD students first of all do follow a joint curriculum which is composed by a course supplied by the PhD School of Politecnico and deals with very general items, and then three specific courses tailored on the methods that have to be applied in all branches of our doctorate, namely “statistical analysis of environmental data”, which comprise the arguments of “Monte Carlo Markov Chain” methods and “Risk assessment”, and “numerical methods”. Then each specific area has its own courses and seminars: