Department of Environmental Engineering currently has 16 teachers, including 5 professors and 6 associate professors. The department mainly focuses on water demand in environmental governance and urban development in China to carry out technological development and transformation of scientific achievements. Currently, the department won 3 National Science and Technology Progress Awards in 2005, 2009 and 2012; published more than 200 papers in the past 5 years, including 124 SCI papers; obtained 28 patents; undertook 4 major projects of the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of Environmental Protection, 1 major project of the National Natural Science Foundation, 12 general projects of the National Natural Science Foundation, 5 youth fund projects of the National Natural Science Foundation, and 12 projects of the Science and Technology Department in Jilin Province.

Focusing on the construction of high-level laboratories, the department has established a “Jilin Provincial Science and Technology Innovation Center for Sewage Treatment and Water Quality Protection” and a “Jilin Provincial Wastewater Treatment and Resource Engineering Laboratory”. According to the needs of laboratory development, the department has successively purchased lots of sophisticated testing equipments, including gas chromatography, high performance liquid chromatography, three-dimensional fluorescence spectrometry, ion chromatography, total organic carbon analyzers, and PCR machines, which has greatly upgraded the academic level of platform. The “Environmental Engineering Master's Training Center” was established in 2015, and thereafter has become a production, education, and research training base in cooperation with more than 10 enterprises and institutions in order to improve the quality of postgraduate cultivation.

At present, the goal of the department is to solve the key technical issues in the water environment protection, and therefore carries out a large number of researches on the development and application of advanced wastewater treatment and reclaimed water utilization. The department has established 2 research teams of “Urban Waste Water Recycling and Storage” and “Wastewater Treatment and Resource Utilization”. In the direction of advanced wastewater treatment, Professor ZHOU Dandan leads the research team of “Wastewater Treatment and Resource Recovery” to address the issue of persistent pollutants degradation and resource conversion in wastewater, develop advanced treatment technologies and control of persistent organic/inorganic pollutants, reveal the mechanism and process control of microbial granulation, microalgal heterotrophic culture, etc.. The research group has been funded by a number of provincial and ministerial-level projects. In the direction of the usage of recycled water, Prof. HUO Mingxin leads the research team of “Urban Waste Water Recycling and Storage” to focus on water quality control and the key risk factors identification in urban wastewater and the underground storage of recycled water, and therefore has won 7 funds of National Natural Science Foundation Project.