The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering is excited to welcome our new 2025 faculty members.
Hyeyoung Koh
Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Dr. Koh is conducting research in the area of intelligent and AI-aided design of steel and hybrid structures with an emphasis on their resilience and sustainability. Her group conducts research on the next generation of structural design and analysis by employing various methodological approaches including data analytics, distributed sensing, physical experiments, and computational modeling. Before joining WSU, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She received the 2024 Yoon Duk Kim Young Researcher Award from the Structural Stability Research Council (SSRC) within the American Institute of Steel Construction. She serves as vice-chair of the SSRC Task Group 03 – Steel Systems and as a committee member on the Stability Committee in the ASCE Engineering Mechanics Institute. Dr. Koh holds a PhD from University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Hanyang University in South Korea.
Zhijie Wang
Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Wang’s research focuses on advancing the resilience and sustainability of geotechnical systems in both the built and natural environment. He integrates multiscale computational modeling, physical experimentation, sensing technologies, and artificial intelligence to develop next-generation digital twins of infrastructure—systems that are adaptive to environmental change and provide decision support throughout their life cycle. Wang earned his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering (Geotechnical) from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and his M.S. and B.S. in Civil Engineering from Zhejiang University, China. Prior to joining WSU, he was a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Pittsburgh. In addition to his academic background, Wang brings over five years of industry experience at a Fortune Global 500 company, where he led initiatives in land acquisition, property development, construction automation, and smart supply chain systems across both the U.S. and China.
Huiyun Wu
Assistant Professor, Environmental Engineering, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Dr. Wu’s research is the area of microbial water equality, environmental microbiome, and water research. Her research is focused on data-driven strategies for advancing water sustainability, molecular microbiology applications, and environmental microbiome investigation. She has worked on multiple interdisciplinary research projects, including water reuse, wastewater-based epidemiology and sanitary sewage overflow survey, environmental metagenomics, microbial source tracking, stormwater management, and microbial water quality modeling. She is also interested in participating citizen science and serving the community. Before joining WSU, Dr. Wu participated in a two-year Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) fellowship with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences in the School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine at Tulane University. She holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from Michigan State University.