Rate My Professor Joel Ducoste

Joel Ducoste is the Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Success in the College of Engineering and a Distinguished University Professor of Civil Engineering in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at North Carolina State University. He received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 1988 and an M.Eng. in Mechanical Engineering in 1989 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering in 1996 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before joining NC State in 1998 as an Assistant Professor, he worked as a manufacturing engineer at GE Aircraft Engines from 1989 to 1991 and a senior process engineer at CH2M Hill from 1996 to 1998. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2004 and Professor in 2010, served as Assistant Dean for Graduate Student Advancement from 2018 to 2020, and became Associate Dean in 2020.

A board-certified environmental engineer, Dr. Ducoste specializes in modeling water and wastewater treatment processes using computational fluid dynamics. His research interests encompass physico-chemical processes in water treatment, water/wastewater process optimization, wastewater sewer collection system sustainability, renewable energy from waste, plant biosystems engineering, solid waste process modeling, and disinfection of pathogenic aerosols. He has authored over 200 peer-reviewed publications, including "Fat, Oil, and Grease Sewer Waste Management System: A Modeling Platform for Simulating the Formation of FOG Deposits in Sewer Networks" (2024, Journal of Environmental Engineering), "Microbial community assembly in engineered bioreactors" (2024, Water Research), and "Measurement and Temperature Prediction from Ash Disposed in Landfills Using a Quasi-Adiabatic Flow Reactor" (2024, ACS ES&T Engineering). Ducoste has earned the NSF CAREER Award (2001), Fulbright Fellowship (2006), Fellowship in the Water Environment Federation (2020) and Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors (2023), and the WEF Fair Distinguished Engineering Educator Medal (2021). He has served on multiple EPA advisory boards, was President of AEESP from 2020 to 2021, and currently sits on the Board of Trustees of the American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists as well as the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Environmental Science: Water Research and Technology.