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Brown shield Brown shield Brown University Division of Engineering Brown shield Brown shield Brown University Division of Engineering

About Us

The Division of Engineering is a unique place, which emphasizes the power of interdisciplinary thought and recognizes that engineering is intertwined with every aspect of our lives.  Our historical roots are truly interdisciplinary. The Division is organized without the traditional departments or boundaries found at most schools; our model is focused on making unique connections between the various engineering disciplines.  Along with our associations with the other scholarly disciplines – biology, medicine, physics, chemistry, computer science, the humanities and the social sciences – our co-operations bring unique solutions to challenging problems.  The Division focuses on unique and innovative clustering of faculty; in terms of research groups, engineers of all types team together with non-engineers to tackle some of the biggest problems facing engineering and science today.  Our talents and expertise lie in the interdisciplinary domain where the seemingly diverse disciplines converge.

We've developed a number of links to key initiatives and areas of strength within the Division:


The Division of Engineering has an array of degree options, offering ABET accredited undergraduate Bachelor of Science degrees in Biomedical, Civil, Chemical, Computer, Mechanical, Electrical and Materials Engineering. We also offer additional flexible degree options where students are afforded more electives, which include the Bachelor of Arts degree in Engineering and Commerce, Organization and Entrepreneurship (COE), as well as a Bachelor of Science in Engineering-Physics.  The Brown Engineering Curriculum is unique in the sense that all students participate in a common interdisciplinary suite of courses, called the core, for their first two years prior to making a decision on which engineering concentration to purse in depth. 

At the graduate level, the faculty in the Division work in all of the preceding traditional disciplines, but are organized into five main research thrust areas: Mechanics of Solids and Structures; Materials Science; Fluid, Thermal and Chemical Processes; Electrical Sciences and Computer Engineering; and Biomedical Engineering.  The Engineering faculty has been extremely successful in attracting both federal and private sector funding to support their research programs, and is on the cutting edge of research in their fields.  As is evident from the boundary-less engineering model described below and a porous periphery to the other scholar disciplines, the Division provides students and faculty alike with challenging and multidisciplinary problems. These problems are greater than any one person or group and may require underpinning principles from many disciplines, from theory to simulation to complex experimentations, to ultimately solve the problem.

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The illustration above depicts the co-operations between the Engineering faculty and the other scholarly disciplines on campus, highlighting the interdisciplinary culture in the Division.  Engineering is becoming exceedingly more valuable to other disciplines and is vastly expanding in today’s age of innovation, becoming integral to solutions in many fields.  The Division has strong connections and collaborations with many departments around campus and with local hospitals.  This chart emphasizes a way of thought and the culture utilized to solve problems by leveraging the collective intellectual capability of the students and faculty from many different disciplines around campus.

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