IN FOCUS Achieving Excellence in

Civil engineers have traditionally played an important role in developing infrastructures which shape city skylines and enable the exploitation and harnessing of the earth's natural resources that underpin the economic growth engine. Human activities create stresses on the environment and affect the natural cycles in soil, atmosphere and water bodies. These stresses have led to the degradation of natural habitats and adverse global scale environmental impacts such as ozone layer depletion and global wanning. As civil engineers address problems associated with aging urban infrastructures, growth in human population and economic activities continues to exert ever increasing demand for new infrastructures. Amid signs of intensifying natural disasters such as floods, forest fires, typhoons and earth quakes, civil engineers also have to face emerging needs to protect the population against manmade threats such as biological and chemical terrorism and structural blast damages. There is also an increasing awareness of the need to build resource-efficient structures to preserve the environment, and maintain a sustainable relationship with the earth's natural resources. Civil engineers are being challenged to deliver products and services of higher quality and greater efficiency. To remain efficient and relevant, civil engineers will need to continue to advance the knowledge in such diverse disciplines as solid mechanics, environmental fluid dynamics, structural dynamics, smart materials technology, and molecular biotechnology. The School, besides performing its primary role of providing education, also places equal emphasis on research and development of innovative engineering solutions to problems relevant to the natural and built environment. The R & D efforts of the School have gained recognition from the industiy as reflected by its winning of two Singapore Institution o