Environmental Systems Analysis

BEE 4750/5750
Fall 2025
Cornell University

This course was developed to teach students to think in systems: how to understand the dynamics resulting from combinations of environmental processes and use mathematical optimization methods to identify management strategies. We emphasize computational modeling for both simulation and optimization and discuss related concepts such as lifecycle assessment and risk quantification. These methods are illustrated using a variety of environmental systems applications.

Instructor

TA

Samantha Davies
sld238@cornell.edu
217 Riley-Robb Hall

Course details

MW
2:55-4:10pm
105 Riley-Robb

Contacting staff

(Instructor) M 1-2, T 4-5
(TA) MW 4:15-5:15
Ed Discussion

Software Tools

This course will use the Julia programming language. Julia is a modern, free, open source language which is designed for scientific computing. No prior knowledge of Julia is required. My recommendation is to use Visual Studio Code with the official Julia extension for coding.
Assignments will be distributed using GitHub Classroom. You should create a GitHub account, but we will walk through how to use it.