Grad Profiles - George Washington University Engineering

Overview
George Washington University was chartered as a private university in 1821, in response to the hope of President George Washington that a national university be established in the federal city. GW has seven schools in addition to the School of Engineering and Applied Science. The others, which offer collaborative opportunities for engineering students, include arts and sciences, business and public management, education, international affairs, law, medicine, and public health and health services. Organized at GW in 1884, the School of Engineering and Applied Science is one of the oldest in America and was one of the first to admit women.

Students in the School include graduates from most U.S. colleges and universities and from seventy countries around the world. Approximately 1,300 students are working on master's degrees, 50 on professional degrees, and 400 on doctorates. Approximately 40 percent of SEAS students are international, 30 percent are members of minority populations, and 25 percent are women.

The Location and Community
The School offers most programs at the main campus in the Foggy Bottom historic district of Washington, D.C., and selected programs at the GW Virginia campus in the nearby northern Virginia foothills. Within a couple of hours' drive east of the University lie the beaches of Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware, and west to the mountains are U.S. national forests and parks, where recreation includes skiing, fishing, hiking, and camping. Cultural activities in Washington, D.C., frequently free of charge, include the rich resources of the Smithsonian and other museums, performance art in numerous local and national theaters such as Wolf Trap Farm Park and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, seasonal events and athletics along the Potomac River and the C&O Canal, and scores of restaurants featuring ethnic-American and international foods.

Programs of Study and Degree Requirements
The School of Engineering and Applied Science offers the graduate degrees of Master of Science, Master of Engineering Management, Applied Scientist, Engineer, and Doctor of Science. Graduate-level certificate programs are also offered. The fields of study are civil and environmental engineering, computer engineering, computer science, electrical engineering (including biomedical engineering), engineering management, mechanical and aerospace engineering, systems engineering, and telecommunications and computers. Interdisciplinary study is encouraged, especially at the doctoral level. Some interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary programs are formalized at the master's level; for example, in industrial engineering and in engineering statistics. Within most fields, students may design their degree programs to pursue their own professional goals and academic interests, following curricular guidelines of the School and in consultation with the academic adviser. The minimum master's program of 24 credit hours plus a 6-credit-hour thesis, or 30 or 33 credit hours without a thesis, culminates in some departments with the master's comprehensive examination. The professional degree programs (App.Sc. and Engr.) require a minimum of 30 hours of courses beyond the master's degree. A technical project may be required. Course work done for the professional degree may be transferred to the D.Sc., and vice versa, under some conditions. The D.Sc. program requires 30 hours of course work beyond the master's degree or 54 hours beyond the bachelor's degree, followed by a doctoral qualifying examination. The dissertation, requiring a minimum of 24 credit hours of work under the guidance of an adviser, is also presented orally in the final examination. The School's dissertations have had application in industry-such as an evaluation model of an oil spill contingency plan or an analysis of red blood cell flow; in government-for example, in projecting risks associated with nuclear reactors; and in higher education-through refined theoretical formulations of traditional problems.

Facilities & Resources
The University's three libraries hold more than 2 million volumes. Students have access to the Library of Congress and may consult GW's computerized catalog of holdings, those of six other local university libraries, and selected periodical indexes on line. The School of Engineering and Applied Sciences students may use laboratories that are well equipped as facilities for course work, experimentation, and research. Laboratories focus, for example, on artificial intelligence, biomedical systems, communications, computer-aided design, computer-aided manufacturing, decision support systems, digital electronics, energy technology, fiber optics and lasers, fluid mechanics, materials science, propulsion, robotics, soil mechanics, and VLSI design and testing. Research institutes organized by the faculty as sites for advancing their research are described on the reverse page. The Washington, D.C., area has the second-largest concentration of research and development activity in the United States, and many national laboratories are available to SEAS students for research.

Expenses and Aid
Tuition was charged at the rate of $934 per credit hour for the academic year and is payable on a course-by-course basis.

Financial Aid:
Teaching assistantships may provide tuition for full-time graduate study and a salary for each section taught or supervised per semester. Research assistants may receive salaries or stipends for both academic- and calendar-year appointments. School Graduate Fellow, Dean's Fellow, and Department Fellow awards range from $7500 to $15,000 for eligible full-time students. Department Fellow awardees may also receive 18 semester hours of tuition credit. Full-time students who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents may be eligible for half-tuition Graduate Engineering Honors Fellowships.

Housing/Living Expenses:
Apartments for students are available in the surrounding area at a wide range of costs. These costs start at approximately $750 a month.

How to Apply / Application
For all graduate programs except the D.Sc. in engineering management, applications are processed as they are received, and admission is granted while space is available; February 1 and October 1 are the priority deadlines for fall and spring. International applicants must submit scores on the TOEFL; 550 on the paper-based test (213, computer-based) is the minimum for admission directly to graduate study. Submission of Graduate Record Examinations scores is recommended if the GRE is taken and is required when admission is sought to the D.Sc. program by an applicant whose highest degree is the baccalaureate or when financial aid is sought.

Who to Contact
Office of Admissions and Student Records
School of Engineering and Applied Science
George Washington University
Washington, D.C. 20052

202-994-6158

800-537-7327

E-mail: engineering@gwu.edu

Graduate Programs

• Civil and Environmental Engineering
Research activities include advanced crash-analysis simulations at the GW/Department of Transportation National Crash Analysis Center located at the GW Northern Virginia Research Campus and Intelligent Transportation System research within the Intelligent Systems Center at the same location. New research activities in remote sensing, GIS, and GPS and geospatial engineering are being conducted at both the Foggy Bottom and Northern Virginia campuses. Other areas of research include biosystems processing of wastewater, electro-coagulation for water and wastewater applications, and concrete bridge deck design. Research for the design of intelligent-responsive homes for the twenty-first century is underway through a cooperative program with America Online and state-of-the-art earthquake engineering is occurring with our new "6-degrees of freedom" shake table.

• Computer Science
Major areas of research include distributed systems, computer networks (wireless, optical, Internet), mobile computing, computer and network security, cyberspace policy, computer architecture and embedded systems, pervasive computing, Web technology, software engineering, multimedia systems, computer graphics, animation, virtual reality, design of user interfaces, adaptive learning and human computer interaction.

• Electrical and Computer Engineering
Active research groups of the faculty and graduate students are working in biomedical engineering-medical instrumentation, telemedicine, medical image analysis, and bioinformatics; communication and networking-theoretical problems of modulations and coding, mobile communication systems and networks, all-optical networking, high-speed telecommunication networks and Internet; computer architecture and networking-high-performance processor architecture, embedded systems, high-performance computing systems, and reconfigurable computing; electromagnetics-magnetics (memories and devices), fibers and integrated optics, antennas, propagation and microwave devices, radar and remote sensing systems; microelectronics and VLSI-designing and testing VLSI digital/analog circuits, VLSI circuits with applications to signal processing and communications, numerical device modeling, sensors design and applications, and nanotechnology; multimedia processing-image analysis and understanding, video and audio processing, and multimedia algorithms; signal processing and systems-digital signal processing, real-time DSP algorithms, control systems, radar and sonar signal processing, power generation, transmission and distribution.

• Engineering Management and Systems Engineering
Active research areas of the faculty and graduate students encompass construction and facilities management; cost effectiveness; crisis and emergency management; design-for-manufacturing methods for costing and process planning; decision support systems; emergency health and medical management systems; engineering and project management; environmental management; information management; information security and assurance; information systems; information technology applied to disaster and crisis management systems; intelligent information retrieval; knowledge management; modeling and simulation of complex, adaptive systems; modeling housing damage and resulting mass care needs in earthquakes; maritime safety systems and risk management; evaluating and monitoring risk; privacy and technology; systems and software engineering; strategic planning; and systems engineering processes. Current research in stochastic modeling includes simulation; Bayesian statistics applied to decision analysis and quality assurance; practical concerns in reliability; improved assessment of software reliability; reliability and risk assessment; stress models for accelerated reliability testing; warranty analysis; reliability and quality control, with a focus on software reliability and equipment warranties; and statistical and game theoretic aspects of the warranty problem. Other research embraces artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms; theory, algorithms, and applications related to optimization; sensitivity analysis for finitely constrained problems; integer, nonlinear, and nonconvex algorithmic development and applications, including health-care, defense, and economic modeling; nonparametric discriminant analysis via optimization; and game theoretic models and applications to societal problems.

• Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Research encompasses design of mechanical engineering systems, including computer-aided design and manufacturing, computer-integrated manufacturing, and robotics; fluid mechanics, thermal sciences, and energy; aerospace engineering, including aeronautics and flight dynamics, astronautics, and propulsion; and solid mechanics and materials science. Major research investigations are under way in composite materials and testing, computational fluid dynamics, controls, finite-element analysis and finite element models for biomechanical analysis, fracture mechanics, neural networks, numerical optimization and artificial intelligence, robotics, structure and chemistry of thin films and surfaces, vehicle dynamics (including a space station modal identification experiment), computational aeroacoustics, high-Knudsen-number gasdynamics and wind tunnel design, laser diagnostics for supersonic and combustion flows (including experiments on fuel mixing and combustion in scramjets), microgravity two-phase flow, nonsteady flow induction, spacecraft control (including advanced flight deck technology research), strong vortex/boundary layer and launch vehicle/payload interactions, and vortex dynamics.