Graduate Studies in ChemE
- Admission
- Program Overview
- Miscellaneous
The University of Washington is the largest university in the northwestern United States. Its full-time equivalent enrollment is about 28,000 and the total enrollment about 34,000. It has been the top-ranking U. S. public university in terms of federal research funding for the past decade.
The UW Department of Chemical Engineering has 15 full-time faculty members and a graduate enrollment of about 70. Several additional faculty members in other programs (such as Bioengineering) have joint appointments in Chemical Engineering. Thus, the Department is large enough to offer a wide range of research topics, yet small enough so faculty and students all know one another.
We offer studies leading to the degrees of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Master of Science in Chemical Engineering, and Master of Science in Engineering. The Ph.D. degree, which generally requires four to five years to complete, involves course work but emphasizes research leading to the doctoral dissertation.
For the Master's, which requires about two years, more emphasis is on course work. Thesis and nonthesis options are available, the former requiring both course work and research.
Graduate students study and collaborate with members of the faculty in an atmosphere more informal and intellectually vigorous than is usually found in undergraduate work. The range of interests among the faculty members is broad, so students have access to a variety of fields while receiving individual attention and guidance.
Course work normally includes basic subjects of importance to all chemical engineers, such as thermodynamics, transport phenomena, reaction engineering, and applied mathematics. Students are encouraged, however, to take additional courses to develop breadth and to gain experience in areas relevant to their research.
We are fortunate to have outstanding facilities. The chemical engineering building, Benson Hall, contains classrooms, offices, stockrooms, well-staffed machine and electronics shops, and laboratories. Computer facilities are excellent, ranging from an array of PCs to workstation, mainframe, and supercomputer access.
