Biological & Agricultural Engineering

Agricultural Engineering

This option gives you the skills to design practical and efficient solutions to producing, storing, transporting, processing, and packaging agricultural products.

• Learn the fundamentals of designing agricultural machinery, equipment, and structures.
• Devise more efficient ways to use natural resources and reduce pollution.
• Develop ways to make biofuels from agricultural products, byproducts, and waste.

Our faculty is currently researching many topics in agricultural engineering, including machine vision, precision irrigation systems, biological waste treatment, and biofuel production.

Bioenergy Engineering

This option gives you the skills to design and test new ways to produce energy and fuels from biological sources. You will learn how bio-fuels are made from agricultural products, byproducts, and waste.

• Understand the fundamentals of treating municipal, industrial and agricultural wastes.
• Learn about industrial processes such as grinding, extraction and controlling large-scale chemical reactions.
• Conduct life cycle analyses on energy sources to determine their cradle-to-grave environmental impact.
• Help develop more efficient ways to use natural resources and reduce pollution.

Our faculty is currently researching many topics in bioenergy engineering, including biodiesel production, renewable aviation fuels, cellulosic ethanol, and biogas from animal waste.

Biological Systems Engineering

This option gives you the skills to design, manage, and develop systems and equipment to improve the health and safety of people, animals, and the environment. You will gain a solid understanding of the neurological, muscular, and mechanical functions that occur in the human body. You will learn to assess weaknesses in these functions and to design solutions.Design solutions include examples such as a prosthesis for a missing limb or a new way to deliver drugs to cells.

Ecohydrological Engineering

You will learn about the interaction of the hydrological cycle and ecosystems, and how water and water quality play a role in the environment while helping soil productivity. You will learn how water interacts and flows through forests, fields, and urban areas to the stream. You can apply for jobs to design systems to control runoff and erosion, restore streams, protect or design wetlands, and improve stream quality. You can join our faculty in research on watershed hydrology and water quality, health of fish in streams, the effects of climate change on water availability, and transport of disease-causing microorganisms in groundwater.

Environmental Engineering

This option will give you skills to design equipment and manage industrial processes that make efficient and sustainable use of natural resources.

• Learn to monitor groundwater quality, measure sediment levels, and treat waste.
• Develop ways to make biofuels from agricultural products, byproducts, and waste.

Our faculty is currently researching many topics in environmental engineering. They are developing computer models to predict the effects of climate change on water availability in Idaho, treating polluted soil and aquifers using microbes, designing bioreactors that make natural gas from animal waste, tracing lead poisoning through the digestive tracts of native snow geese, and much more.