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Abbas El-Zein

Abbas El-Zein

BSc, MSc (with distinction), PhD
Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering



School of Civil Engineering, Room 339
Phone: +61 2 9351 7351
Fax: +61 2 9351 3343
Email:




Personal homepage: http://www.civil.usyd.edu.au/personal/abbas

Research interests & current/recent research projects

Computational geomechanics; contaminant migration in soil; environmental risk perception; vulnerability to climate change.
(for more details please see personal page http://www.civil.usyd.edu.au/personal/abbas)

Selected publications

  • Ali El-Hanandeh and Abbas El-Zein. 2010. Life-cycle assessment of municipal solid waste management alternatives with consideration of uncertainty: SIWMS development and application. Waste Management, 30(5):902-911.
  • Ali El-Hanandeh and Abbas El-Zein. 2010. The development and application of a multi-criteria decision making tool with consideration of uncertainty: the selection of a management strategy for the bio-degradable fraction in the municipal solid waste. Bioresource Technology, 101(2):555-561.
  • Abbas El-Zein. 2009. A non-isodimensional finite-element approach to the modeling of transient flow and mass transport through domains with thin layers. [[b||Computers and Structures|| (special journal issue for 5th MIT Conference on Computational Fluid and Solid Mechanics, Advances in CFD), 87:618-629.
  • Ali El Hanandeh and Abbas El-Zein. 2009. Strategies for the municipal waste management system to take advantage of carbon trading under competing policies: the role of energy from waste in Sydney. Waste Management, 29:2188-2194.
  • Abbas El-Zein, Tim Langrish and Nigel Balaam. 2009. Blended teaching and learning of computer programming skills in engineering curricula. Advances in Engineering Education, 1(3).
  • Abbas El-Zein and R. Kerry Rowe. 2008. Impact on groundwater of concurrent leakage and diffusion of dichloromethane through geomembranes in landfill liners. Geosynthetics International, 15(1):55-71.
  • Abbas El-Zein. 2008. A generalized approach to the modelling of contaminant transport through intact and leaking geomembranes. International Journal for Numerical and Analytical Methods in Geomechanics, 32(3):265-287.
  • Abbas El-Zein, David Airey, Peter Bowden, Henriikka Clarkeburn. 2008. Sustainability and ethics as decision-making paradigms in engineering curricula. International Journal for Sustainability in Higher Education, 9(2):170-182.
  • Abbas El-Zein, Iman Nuwayhid, Mutassem Fadel, Salman Mroueh. 2007. Did a ban on diesel-fuel reduce emergency respiratory admissions for children? Science of the Total Environment, 384:134-140.
  • Abbas El-Zein. 2006. Steady-state diffusion-advection by exponential finite elements. International Journal of Geomechanics ASCE, 6(6):428-434.
  • Abbas El-Zein, Rola Nasrallah, Iman Nuwayhid, Lea Kai, Jihad Makhoul. 2006. Why do neighbours have different environmental priorities? An analysis of environmental risk perception in a Beirut neighbourhood. Risk Analysis, 26(2):423-436.
  • Abbas El-Zein, John P. Carter and David W. Airey. 2006. Three-dimensional finite element method for the analysis of soil contamination. International Journal for Numerical and Analytical Methods in Geomechanics, 30(7), 577-597.
  • Abbas El-Zein. 2005. Exponential finite elements for diffusion-advection problems. International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, 62(15):2086-2103.
  • Abbas El-Zein, John Carter and David Airey. 2005. Multiple-porosity contaminant migration by finite-elements. International Journal of Geomechanics ASCE, 5(1):24-36.
  • Abbas El-Zein, Mylene Tewtel-Salem and Gebran Nehme. 2004. A time-series analysis of daily mortality and air temperature in Greater Beirut. Science of the Total Environment, 330(1-3):71-80.

Teaching and Learning

Teaching Duties

  • CIVL3010 Engineering and Society (3rd year civil engineering)
  • CIVL5351 Geoenvironmental Engineering (graduate unit of study)

School & University Service

  • Director of Teaching and Learning at the School of Civil Engineering
  • Chair of the Faculty of Engineering Library Committee
  • Member of the Faculty of Engineering Advisory Board for Engineers without Borders