News Story

November 21, 2024 UMD Home FabLab AIMLab

Maryland Engineering ranks #11 among public colleges in the U.S.

The University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering ranks #11 among the country’s public universities in U.S. News & World Report 2022-23 Best Colleges rankings, rising one spot from #12 in 2022.

The 2022-23 list, released on September 12, also ranks the Clark School as the #22 overall undergraduate engineering program in the nation.

"The Clark School of Engineering has outstanding faculty, staff, and students. These rankings reflect the incredible community they have built to foster both education and innovation that impacts the world,” Dean Samuel Graham, Jr. said. "I am proud of the accomplishments of our Maryland Engineers and the direction we are headed. We are developing the leaders our nation needs to address grand challenges."

Two Clark School departments—Civil & Environmental Engineering and Electrical & Computer Engineering—follow suit, moving up to 18th (Civil), 13th (Electrical), and 12th (Computer) among public institutions. Mechanical Engineering maintains its position at #12. Bioengineering and Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering debut in the rankings at #9 and #15 respectively.

Another Year of Societal Impact

This recognition from the U.S. News voters concludes the Clark School’s successful academic year and summer. On July 12, 2022, citizens of Earth saw the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. Among them were two Maryland Engineering alumni—Wen-Hsien Chuang (ECE Ph.D. 2005) and Dan Kelly (ECE M.S. 2005; ECE B.S. 2002)—who knew exactly how those pictures were obtained and processed. Both played key roles in developing the Near InfraRed Spectrograph, a breakthrough instrument designed to observe up to 100 space objects simultaneously.

Best-in-Class Student Competition Teams

Current aerospace engineering students received a Best in Theme award for a suitport logistics carrier presented at the 2022 NASA’s Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts – Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) competition. Designed to operate on the surface of the Moon, Mars, and beyond, this vehicle can transfer pressurized and temperature sensitive goods between a lunar lander and surface habitat.

Closer to Earth, another Maryland Engineering student team took the first place in the inaugural First Responder UAS Triple Challenge 3.1: FastFind Competition hosted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Student inventors presented an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system that could "increase the speed of search and rescue operations where direct visual contact with a potential subject may be obscured."

For the fifth time since 2017, Maryland Engineering undergraduates won the Annual Student Design Competition organized by the Vertical Flight Society (VFS). Their "Blitzen", an electric vertical takeoff and landing air taxi for passengers with reduced mobility, offered accommodations for a wheelchair, storage for large medical devices, and resources for those with impaired hearing.

Over the summer, UMD hosted three international robotics competitions, with thousands of international K-12, undergraduate, and graduate students building and testing robots and autonomous aerial and underwater vehicles in the Neutral Buoyancy Research Facility, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Test Site, and other venues.

New World-Class Facilities

Back in College Park, the Alfred Gessow Rotorcraft Center, as well as multiple other labs and student teams, moved into the newly opened E.A. Fernandez IDEA Factory, a research and entrepreneurship hub built for young inventors. In Southern Maryland, their peers innovated away in the labs of the new Southern Maryland Autonomous Research and Technology (SMART) Building.

Prolific Partnerships

The Clark School also expanded its collaboration with Amazon, conducting the Amazon-University of Maryland Design Challenge with undergraduate students proposing enhancements for Spotify and other apps.

Welcoming young researchers of all backgrounds, Maryland Engineering and Microsoft formed a partnership to support Ph.D. fellowships, student-led diversity STEM groups, a seminar series, and a minor in robotics programming.

The college's efforts diversifying the engineering profession gained recognition from the National Science Foundation. At the end of the summer, the NSF ranked the University of Maryland as #1 non-historically Black college for African American undergraduates who later achieved doctoral degrees from 2010 to 2020.

Maryland Engineering rankings

Department	Overall	Public
Aerospace Engineering	13	9
Bioengineering	24	9
Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering	28	16
Civil & Environmental Engineering	26	18
Computer Engineering	20	12
Electrical Engineering	22	13
Mechanical Engineering	20	12