Doctor of Philosophy

NEW! Applications for the new Ph.D. program in Computer Science are now being accepted.

The department offers two programs leading to a Ph.D. One program leads to a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, the other to a Ph.D. in computer science. Students in each program must already have an M.S. degree in the same or a related field. Applicants to the Ph.D. program who do not have an M.S. will instead be considered for admission to the M.S. program, and upon completion of the M.S., will automatically be considered for admission to the Ph.D. program.

The department differentiates between admission to the Ph.D. program and Ph.D. candidacy. No students are accepted as formal doctoral candidates until they have exhibited merit in a qualifying examination and have identified a faculty member who has agreed to be their dissertation supervisor. Doctoral candidates are expected to plan a program of research under the direction of their dissertation supervisor and with the guidance of a faculty committee. Upon completion of this research, the candidate must prepare and publicly defend a dissertation.

Doctoral students in electrical engineering must take twenty credits beyond the M.S. degree. This includes both course work and a dissertation, where the dissertation effort is usually assigned ten credits. The qualifying examination is a single, written exam that must be taken within one academic year of admission to the Ph.D. program (within two academic years for part-time students). In addition, students of electro-optics are required to take four of the five laboratory courses that comprise the EOTC Laboratory Program (Electrical Engineering 151, 152, 153, 154, and 155) if they cannot demonstrate a previously completed equivalent.

Doctoral students in computer science take courses to prepare themselves for the qualifying examination and to develop expertise in their dissertation topic area. The qualifying examination is divided into two parts. In Part 1, students must pass a breadth exam within one academic year of admission to the Ph.D. program (within two academic years for part-time students). This exam is based on five areas of computer science that each student helps to select. In Part 2, students must pass a specialty exam in their dissertation topic area within one year of passing Part 1 (within two academic years for part-time students).

Typical areas available for dissertations in electrical engineering, computer engineering and electro-optics include solid-state materials with an emphasis on optoelectronic and solar energy applications, microwave devices and systems, microwave thermography, electromagnetics, antennas, plasma physics, control theory and applications, small computers, microprocessor applications, computer architecture, multiprocessing, VLSI design, VLSI CAD, microelectronics, fabrication, hybrid microelectronics, computer-controlled network analyzers, communications systems, information theory, signal processing, analog and digital electronics, opto-electronics, Fourier optics, coherence theory, image analysis, nonlinear optics, and circuit theory.

Typical areas available for dissertations in computer science include artificial intelligence, data compression, databases, human computer interaction, machine learning, parallel and distributed computation, scientific computation, and visualization.