In the fall semester of the 2025-2026 academic year, the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering (CaSE) in the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering will launch four new courses to broaden academic offerings and better prepare students to address grand societal challenges. Taught by newly appointed faculty members Magdalena Klemun, Jan Drgona, Dan Kammen, and Hao (Frank) Yang, the courses enhance the curriculum’s focus on sustainability, machine learning, energy policy, technology innovation, and data-driven decision making.
The new courses are in alignment with the department’s comprehensive, multi-year transformation of its civil and systems engineering curriculum to educate students to design the next generation of sustainable infrastructure, and to understand systems, analyze complex interactions, and optimize solutions for societal benefit.
Assistant Professor Magdalena Klemun will teach Drivers of Technological Change, an interdisciplinary course that examines how innovations develop from ideas into widely adopted technologies. Using clean energy as a central example, the course will introduce models of technological change and their implications for engineers, entrepreneurs, and policymakers engaged in shaping innovation pathways. Students will examine how technologies emerge, improve in performance, diffuse, and how these processes shape economic growth and human development. Drawing on Klemun’s research, the course highlights how insights from studying technology evolution can inform climate innovation, guide technology road mapping and engineering design, and support effective policy development.
Associate Professor Jan Drgona is recognized for his work in scientific machine learning—also known as SciML—applied to control of building energy systems and industrial processes. His graduate-level course, Scientific Machine Learning for Modeling, Optimization, and Control of Dynamical Systems, will teach students how to integrate physics-based models with deep learning architectures to support data-driven decision-making. Students will gain an understanding of the fundamentals of differentiable programming and learn to apply advanced SciML methods to real-world challenges in modeling, optimization, and control of energy systems.
Teaching Energy Systems and Policy is renowned energy expert and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor Dan Kammen. Kammen brings decades of experience developing scalable, equitable energy solutions, and designing policy frameworks that support sustainable development. His work is at the leading edge of renewable energy deployment that emphases energy justice and climate resilience as core pillars of a sustainable world. In the Energy Systems and Policy course, Kammen will guide students in examining the intersections of engineering, policy, equity, and global climate. Students will also learn about the technological, social, and economic dimensions that shape current and future energy choices.
Assistant Professor Hao (Frank) Yang, oversees innovative research to develop trustworthy machine learning and data science methods that improve the equity, safety, and sustainability of urban systems, such as transportation and public health systems. His course, Data Science for Systems Engineers, is tailored towards undergraduate students and will impart the principles and techniques of data processing and data-centric machine learning tailored for societal-scale challenges, like resilient cities, future energy systems, traffic networks, and human safety. The course emphasizes data-centric methods to predict future status, make targeted interventions and ensure sustainable systems’ impact.
Since the program redesign began in 2019, the department has moved beyond traditional ad hoc and empirical approaches in civil engineering. Students are taught to use scientifically grounded analysis and state-of-the-art tools to drive decision-making and innovation. From data science and machine learning to energy policy and systems thinking, the new courses equip students to advance resilient cities, space exploration, future energy infrastructure, decision-making and health, and human safety.
“These courses reflect how civil and systems engineering is evolving—not just as a technical field, but as a way to foster resilience and empower future leaders to shape a better world,” said James Guest, civil and systems engineering department head and professor.
“Our department’s mission is to prepare engineers to address society’s most pressing challenges with rigor and creativity. We are excited to introduce our new faculty, who bring not only exceptional expertise and groundbreaking research to the department, but also a genuine passion for mentoring and inspiring students,” Guest said.