Trisha Shetty (Editor)

Penn State College of Engineering

Updated on
Edit
Like
Comment
Share on FacebookTweet on TwitterShare on LinkedInShare on Reddit
Type
  
Public

Dean
  
Amr S. Elnashai

Website
  
engr.psu.edu

Founded
  
1896

Established
  
1896

Campus
  
Suburban

Phone
  
+1 814-865-7537

Penn State College of Engineering

Location
  
University Park, Pennsylvania, U.S.

Address
  
Penn State University, 101 Hammond Bldg, University Park, PA 16802, USA

Profiles

Penn state college of engineering


The Penn State College of Engineering is the engineering school of the Pennsylvania State University. It was established in 1896, under the leadership of George W. Atherton. Today, with 13 academic departments, over 10,000 enrolled students, and research expenditures that exceed 100 million dollars annually, the Penn State College of Engineering is one of the leading engineering schools in the United States. It is estimated that at least one out of every fifty engineers in the United States got their bachelor's degree from Penn State.

Contents

Penn state college of engineering thank you


Academic departments and rankings

The Penn State College of Engineering was ranked 19th on the list of Best Engineering Undergraduate Schools 2014 and 25th on the list of Best Engineering Graduate Schools in 2011 by U.S. News & World Report. The college has 13 degree granting academic departments, many of which are ranked in top 10 nationally:

  • Acoustics (grants only graduate degrees)
  • Aerospace Engineering - undergraduate program ranked 10th nationally, graduate program ranked 12th.
  • Agricultural and Biological Engineering - undergraduate program ranked 10th nationally, graduate program ranked 9th.
  • Architectural Engineering
  • Bioengineering (also called biomedical engineering)
  • Chemical Engineering - undergraduate program ranked 16th nationally, graduate program ranked 21st.
  • Civil and Environmental Engineering - Civil Engineering undergraduate program ranked 14th nationally, graduate program ranked 19th; Environmental Engineering graduate program ranked 16th nationally.
  • Computer Science and Engineering - Computer Science graduate program ranked 28th nationally; Computer Engineering graduate program ranked 20th nationally.
  • Electrical Engineering - graduate program ranked 25th nationally.
  • Engineering Science and Mechanics - undergraduate program ranked 6th nationally.
  • Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering - undergraduate program ranked 6th nationally in 2014, graduate program ranked 4th.
  • Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering- mechanical engineering undergraduate program ranked 13th nationally, graduate program ranked 16th. Nuclear engineering graduate program ranked 5th nationally.
  • School of Engineering Design, Technology, and Professional Programs (SEDTAPP) (offers design courses)
  • The departments of Materials Science and Engineering, Mining Engineering, Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering, Environmental Systems Engineering, and Energy Engineering are under the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences.
  • Harold and Inge Marcus Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

    Established in 1908, the Harold and Inge Marcus Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University in State College, Pennsylvania, is the oldest industrial engineering department in the world. According to the most recent U.S. News & World Report university rankings, the undergraduate program is ranked eighth in the United States and the graduate program 12th. The department is headed by Janis P. Terpenny, the Peter and Angela Dal Pezzo Chair, and is housed in the Leonhard Building in the West Campus area of University Park. Named for alumnus Harold Marcus and his wife Inge, the department employs 31 faculty members who serve approximately 200 graduate and 400 undergraduate students.

    History

    At the turn of the 20th century, Penn State had developed a national reputation for its engineering curriculum, but industrial engineering was only beginning to emerge as an academic discipline. Noted efficiency expert Frederick Taylor recommended that university president James A. Beaver hire Hugo Diemer, a professor from the University of Kansas, in the hope that Diemer would create an industrial engineering curriculum at Penn State. A two-year option was ready by 1908, and a four-year bachelor's degree program emerged the following year, the first of its kind in the world. At the time, courses consisted of modern industrial engineering fundamentals such as time and motion study, plant layout optimization, and engineering economics, in addition to courses on advertising and sales. The new department also took over the instruction of manual shop skills, including carpentry and metalworking.

    At the time, the department did not have its own building, and for many years shared building space with other departments in the university's College of Engineering. In the 1980s, members of the Penn State Board of Trustees began to consider expanding the campus toward the west, and by 1987, initial plans to construct a new engineering building were in place. The board funded the project in 1995 amid concerns of damaging the aesthetics of the previously undeveloped western edge of campus. Some trustees disapproved of the building design, but the board ultimately released $5 million from its fund dedicated to expanding west campus. In 1998, the project received additional funding from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The building opened in 2000 and was named after William E. Leonhard, a 1936 Penn State College of Engineering alumnus who, with his wife, has donated in excess of $1 million toward engineering at Penn State. In 1999, the department itself was named after alumnus Harold Marcus and his wife Inge, who donated $5 million to the department.

    In 2005, the department restructured the undergraduate industrial engineering curriculum for the first time in 21 years. Shifting its focus somewhat from its traditional manufacturing emphasis, the new curriculum introduced several courses related to the service industry. Four key research areas emerged: Human Factors; Manufacturing; Operations Research; and Production, Supply Chain, and Service Engineering.

    Academics

    The 2014 U.S. News & World Report undergraduate program rankings placed the department eighth in the country, and the graduate program was ranked as tenth. Twenty-nine full-time faculty currently serve nearly 200 graduate and 400 undergraduate students.

    At the undergraduate level, students can pursue a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree in industrial engineering. The first two years of the program consist primarily of general engineering courses, including math and science. Once these introductory courses are complete, students begin taking industrial engineering courses on topics such as engineering economy, manufacturing technology, statistics, work design, and operations research. Undergraduates are also permitted to pursue an approved minor and count three of the credits earned toward their industrial engineering degree.

    The Master of Science (M.S.) degree is available through both a traditional thesis track, or a one-year non-thesis track.

    At the Ph.D. level, students may pursue an industrial engineering degree, a dual-degree in industrial engineering and operations research, or a degree in industrial engineering with a minor in operations research.

    In addition to the study abroad opportunities available to all engineering students at Penn State, the industrial engineering department offers study abroad programs specifically for industrial engineering students.

    Facilities

    The offices of the department are located in the Leonhard Building. The structure encloses 95,200 square feet (8840 m²) on three stories, and its exterior is made of brick, cast stone, and glass. While the building contains some offices for mechanical engineering faculty and hosts a variety of engineering and non-engineering classes, it primarily serves industrial engineering students and faculty. The building contains two lecture halls and multiple classrooms, a 24-hour computer lab, and undergraduate and graduate student lounges.

    The building also contains research and instructional laboratories, including: Additive Manufacturing and Reverse Engineering Lab; Benjamin W. Niebel Work Design Lab; Bridging Research in Innovation, Technology, and Engineering Lab; Complex Systems Monitoring, Modeling and Controls Lab; Design Analysis Technology Advancement Lab; Distributed Intelligent Systems and Controls: Research, Education, and Technology Lab; Engineering Statistics and Machine Learning Lab; Human Performance Assessment and Modeling Lab; Human Analytics Lab; Human Subjects Testing Lab; Laboratory for Quality Engineering and Systems Transitions; Optimization Modeling and Application Lab; Process Mechanics/Workholding Research Lab; Service Engineering and Applied Optimization Lab; and Smart Design and Manufacturing Systems Lab.

    The department also houses and supports a number of research centers and initiatives including the Center for e-Design, Center for Innovative Materials through Direct Digital Deposition, Center for Integrated Healthcare Delivery Systems, Center for Service Enterprise Engineering, Enterprise Integration Consortium, and the Initiative for Sustainable Electric Power Systems.

    Additionally, the building contains a 10,000 square foot (900 m²) high-bay manufacturing lab called the Factory for Advanced Manufacturing Education (FAME lab). With the goal of reinforcing material taught in the classroom and introducing students to common engineering processes, the department brought together a variety of manufacturing equipment. It partnered with Haas Automation to create the Haas Technical Center, a section of the lab that contains 10 Haas CNC machining centers and turning centers.

    Student body

    College of Engineering student body is relatively large, and in 2009 out of 9,736 enrolled students (8,278 undergraduate and 1,458 graduate), 1,480 were women and 545 minorities. First woman engineer to graduate from Penn State was Frances Barbara Hosfeld from Scranton who got a degree in Industrial Engineering in 1921

    The average class size for students in their major is 25. Also, 21% of students in the Schreyer Honors College are from the College of Engineering.

    Research centers

    In addition to intradepartmental research, Penn State College of Engineering faculty and students also conduct research through interdisciplinary research centers and institutes:

  • Applied Research Laboratory (ARL)
  • Vertical Lift Research Center of Excellence (VLRCOE)
  • Center for Acoustics and Vibration (CAV)
  • Institute for Computational Science
  • Materials Research Institute
  • Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment
  • Alumni

    The College of Engineering has over 81,000 living engineering alumni. The Penn State Engineering Alumni Society (PSEAS) is the oldest active alumni group at The Pennsylvania State University.

    Alumni include:

  • Harold W. Gehman, Jr. (1965) served as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Joint Forces Command and NATO Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic until he retired in 2000. In 2003 he was appointed to head the investigation of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.
  • Gregory Lucier (1986), the president and CEO of Invitrogen.
  • Former faculty include Amos E. Neyhart, a traffic safety education pioneer and creator of the first driver education classes in the United States in 1933. Inyong Ham, a Penn State professor (1958–95) and an IIE Fellow, was known for his development of group technology and research on the use of computers in manufacturing and process planning.

    Firsts

  • First accredited in 1936, Architectural Engineering program at Penn State is nation's oldest continuously accredited curriculum in this field.
  • In 1923, professor Paul Schweitzer started one of the first systematic research programs in diesel engineering in United States.
  • In 1909, the first Industrial Engineering academic department and baccalaureate program in the nation were established at Penn State.
  • In 1960, Penn State established the first national curriculum in solid-state technology and in 1962 created the interdisciplinary materials research laboratory.
  • In 1965, Penn State Aerospace engineer Barnes W. McCormick led a research team that made the first wake turbulence measurements behind a full-scale airplane.
  • References

    Penn State College of Engineering Wikipedia