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The Department of Electrical Engineering at the University Park Campus of Penn State University is a comprehensive research-oriented department that offers the BSEE, MSEE, and PhD degrees. The most recent count put the number of undergraduate electrical engineering majors at 672, which represents students in their junior and senior years who have already declared their majors and met departmental admission standards.
The total number of faculty in the Electrical Engineering Department currently stands at 45. Some of these faculty members hold joint appointments with other departments, in particular with the Computer Science and Engineering Department.
The Graduate Program in EE at the University Park Campus of Penn State emphasizes the practical application of electrical sciences and technology to the needs of society. This program is designed to prepare students for careers in industry, teaching, and research. The Electrical Engineering Department offers two graduate degrees, the Master of Science (M.S.) and the Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Electrical Engineering.
The total number of graduate students in the combined graduate programs has been growing during the last ten years, averaging a little more than 250 total students over the last three years. Within this total of 250 students, the number of Ph.D. students has averaged around 110. In general there continues to be a large supply of well qualified M.S. and Ph.D. students who are eager to be admitted to the graduate programs in Electrical Engineering. However, achieving the desired mix of M.S. and Ph.D. students while maintaining a proper balance of domestic, international, minority and female students continues to challenge the Department’s admission procedures.
EE faculty engage in many diverse funded research activities. The total annual research expenditures for the EE Department has averaged approximately $10 million over the last three years. These programs include a wide range of research topics such as molecular electronics (DARPA), advanced materials and devices (NSF MRSEC), advanced laser and photonic technologies (MURI, Navy), wireless communications (Pittsburgh Digital Greenhouse), medical imaging (NIH, Mayo), power electronics (ONR) and advanced digital signal processing (NSF). These research activities offers excellent opportunities to provide training and education at the advanced level to prepare students for graduate studies. With the rapid growth in areas such as photonics, nanotechnologies, data communication, power electronics, intelligent (smart) activation and control, and information processing, more EE faculty work in an increasingly multidisciplinary research environment. Many of these multidisciplinary working environments are not conventional nor familiar to the majority of undergraduate students, particularly for students in community colleges or non-research intensive universities.
The EE Department focuses on nine technical areas in which research and graduate teaching are concentrated.
Communications: Digital communications and information theory, coding, portable and mobile communications, personal communications, point-to-multi-point radios, local wireless communications, optical communications, optical networking, computer networks and information, technology, multimedia communications, mobile multimedia computing, and intelligent networks. Multi-objective and probabilistic robust control, nonlinear systems, intelligent distributed control, adaptive control, active vision, and quantum control.
Electromagnetics: Computational electromagnetics, wave scattering and propagation, interactions with complex media and novel materials, electrodynamics, antenna analysis and design, scattering cross section and antenna measurements, computer visualization, RF and microwave systems, MMIC, EMI and EMC, electronic packaging, and radiometer and radar systems.
Electronic Materials and Devices: Materials and devices for electronic, photonic, bioelectronic and MEMS applications, amorphous and crystalline silicon, II-V compounds, organic thin films, ferroelectric and piezo-electric materials and devices, development of novel device structures and manufacturing methods, device and circuit simulation and modeling, device and material characterization.
Electro-Optics: Fiber optics, optical information processing, information theory, nonlinear optics and materials, quantum electronics, holography, and liquid crystals.
Power Systems: Power system planning, operation, and control, intelligent system applications to power systems, computational tools for power electronic design, quiet motor drives.
Remote Sensing and Space Systems: Active(radar and lidar) and passive (radiometry) remote sensing of the atmosphere, rocket and satellite instrumentation, atmospheric electrodynamics, meteoric effects of the ionosphere, modeling of atmospheric processes, plasma physics.
Signal and Image Processing: Multidimensional signal processing, signal reconstruction theory and algorithms, signal compression, spectral estimation, image processing, medical image analysis, neural networks, multiple target tracking in clutter, adaptive filtering, and data fusion.
Special Research Equipment/Facilities Available at EE
- Anechoic and thermal/vacuum chambers
- Anhydrous HF silicon cleaning system
- Atomic force microscope
- Bailey network 90 control system
- Four-chamber PECVD deposition system
- Laser radars Masers, radiometers, and radars
- Microwave network analyzers
- Molecular beam epitaxy
- Nuclear resonance imager/spectrometer
- NQR test bed facilitate with real-time control of pulse sequence parameters
- Optical tables and components
- Organic film deposition system
- Real-time spectroscopic ellipsometry system
Electrical Engineering Laboratories
- Communications, Electromagnetics
- Electro-optics
- Image Processing, Microwave
- Power Systems
- Quantum Control Systems
- Remote Sensing
- Robust Systems Research
- Semiconductor Device Processing
- Signal Processing
- Space Instrumentation
In addition to the facility listed above that are hosted in The Department of EE, additional facilities and resources are also made available by faculty members who have joint appointments with other academic departments (Materials Science, Computer Science, and Engineering Mechanics) or additional affiliation with the Materials Research Institute. Extensive materials processing and characterization facilities are well maintained and available at those locations within the same campus and will be open to the REU students as well.