Overview
In our country, the fact that cities are transforming into metropolises and that these metropolises require all sorts of engineering structures (high rise buildings, bridges, artistic structures, highways, dams, thermal and nuclear power plants, drinking water and drainage pipelines, historic structures and so on), where all natural disasters, namely earthquakes, floods and landslides are taken into account during the design and construction phase, increases the need for qualified civil engineers every other day. All the disasters that occur in Turkey and its region (earthquakes, floods, landslides, hurricanes, terror etc.), the growing population, migration to urban areas, existing urban transformation projects, recent methods and technological developments in engineering structures, the increasing building stock and number of high rise buildings rapidly boost the problems in the field of Civil Engineering.
Among the aforementioned disasters, although particularly the risk of earthquakes is a subject of Civil Engineering, the courses on earthquakes and earthquake resistant buildings are generally offered as elective within the undergraduate programs in our country. And the topics related to Earthquake Engineering are generally studied within graduate programs. At the Department of Earthquake and Structural Engineering within the Institute of Natural and Applied Sciences at GTU, seismic, structural and geotechnical earthquake engineering topics have been studied as part of the master's and PhD programs since 1999 and 2008, respectively. With the Department of Civil Engineering starting education and teaching in 2016, both our undergraduate and graduate programs have been restructured.
The goal of the Civil Engineering program is to produce engineers who can use the main principles, concepts and methods of Civil Engineering to mitigate risks and minimize damages before and after earthquakes, and who can ensure the development and implementation of new technologies. Interdisciplinary courses such as mathematics, physics and risk analysis are also part of our undergraduate and graduate programs.
Civil Engineering Department offers undergraduate and graduate education in the following areas:
- Earthquake and Structural Engineering
- Geotechnical Engineering
- Hydraulics
- Coastal Engineering
- Construction Materials
- Construction Management
- Transportation
