About

Director’s welcome

Continued Strength

Our faculty, students and staff have redoubled their collaborative efforts to strengthen, grow and broaden the programs in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering. The school’s continued strength in research performance, new areas of research, growth in student enrollment to record levels at all levels and the development of innovative new academic programs have attracted national and international attention.

In the past few years we have grown our faculty expertise and research efforts in energy with a particular focus on photovoltaics, power systems and power electronics. Investments have also been made in terahertz circuits, networks and signal processing. These investments are often led by faculty in our major research centers.

Annual research expenditures continue at impressive levels in an environment of increasing competition for federal funds with limited growth. Our expenditures and new awards have both exceeded $30 million for the past four fiscal years.

These amounts have more than tripled during the time of our current university president. This represents more than $500,000 per tenured/tenure-track faculty member. Achieving these levels of funding has been enabled by the outstanding work of our faculty and their students along with the contributions of several large research centers.

Our primary focus is the education of students, who are important contributors to our research. The majority of our research funding supports students in our program. In addition to graduate students working on sponsored project research, we engage many undergraduates and some high school students in our research labs. In addition to externally sponsored projects, we have a variety fellowships, scholarships and research stipends for all levels of students provided by gifts from generous alumni, corporations and friends. One of our undergraduates, Ngoni Mugwisi, an international student from Zimbabwe, recently earned the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship to further his studies at Oxford.

Our academic programs have grown significantly over the past few years from about 1,200 a decade ago to more than 3,400 in Fall 2021. This includes more than 300 doctoral students — or an average of more than 4 PhD students per tenured or tenure-track faculty member. This large doctoral enrollment is consistent with our strong research expenditures as well as the faculty focus on student recruiting and improving the reputation of our programs. Our graduate programs remain highly recognized with our electrical engineering graduate program ranked 34 by U.S. News and World Report (2022) and ranked in the top 20 by the National Research Council.

The online delivery of our undergraduate program has enabled an unprecedented quadrupling in undergraduate enrollment to more than 3,400 in less than a decade. This new delivery mechanism for our existing program is the first bachelor’s level engineering program accredited by ABET in a 100 percent online format. This ability to use technology to enable access to our program for underserved students has clearly been successful. Of particular note is the more than 42 percent of the online enrollments are veterans or active military students. We continue to leverage technology to provide innovations in our academic programs for an improved experience for our students.

We continue to accelerate our progress through aggressive faculty hiring. The extraordinary efforts of our dedicated faculty, staff and students continue to drive the success of our school.Stephen M. Phillips, Ph.D., P.E.

Professor of Electrical Engineering, Director of the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering