Engineering

Environmental Engineering

Students may pursue either the M.S. or Ph.D. degree in Engineering with a concentration in Environmental Engineering.

Environmental Engineering is an interdisciplinary program engaging faculty from departments in both engineering and the sciences, and managed by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Environmental Engineering addresses the development of strategies to control anthropogenic emissions of pollutants to the atmosphere, waterways, and terrestrial environment; the remediation of polluted natural systems; the design of technologies to treat waste, energy efficiency and environmentally responsible power generation; and the evaluation of contaminant fate in the environment.

Environmental Engineering requires a curriculum that provides students with an understanding of fundamentals in air- and water-quality sciences, contaminant fate and transport, global climate change, water resources, energy, and design concepts for pollutant emission control and treatment.


Materials and Manufacturing Technology

Materials and Manufacturing Technology (MMT) is concerned with the generation and application of knowledge relating the composition, structure, and processing of materials to their properties and applications, as well as the manufacturing technologies needed for production. During the past two decades, MMT has become an important component of modern engineering education, partly because of the increased level of sophistication required of engineering materials in a rapidly changing technological society, and partly because the selection of materials has increasingly become an integral part of almost every modern engineering design. In fact, further improvements in design are now viewed more and more as primarily materials and manufacturing issues. Both the development of new materials and the understanding of present-day materials demand a thorough knowledge of basic engineering and scientific principles including, for example, crystal structure, mechanics, mechanical behavior, electronic, optical and magnetic properties, thermodynamics, phase equilibria, heat transfer, diffusion, and the physics and chemistry of solids and chemical reactions.

The field of MMT ranks high on the list of top careers for scientists and engineers. The services of these engineers and scientists are required in a variety of engineering operations dealing, for example, with design of semiconductors and optoelectronic devices, development of new technologies based on composites and high-temperature materials, biomedical products, performance (quality, reliability, safety, energy efficiency) in automobile and aircraft components, improvement in nondestructive testing techniques, corrosion behavior in refineries, radiation damage in nuclear power plants, fabrication of steels, and construction of highways and bridges.

Subjects of interest in Materials and Manufacturing Technology cover a wide spectrum, ranging from metals, optical and electronic materials to superconductive materials, ceramics, advanced composites, and biomaterials. In addition, the emerging new research and technological areas in materials are in many cases interdisciplinary. Accordingly, the principal objective of the graduate curriculum is to integrate a student’s area of emphasis—whether it be chemical processing and production, electronic and photonic materials and devices, electronic manufacturing and packaging, or materials engineering—into the whole of materials and manufacturing technology. Such integration will increase familiarity with other disciplines and provide students with the breadth they need to face the challenges of current and future technology.

Students with a bachelor’s degree may pursue either the M.S. or Ph.D. degree in Engineering with a concentration in Materials and Manufacturing Technology (MMT). If students choose to enter the Ph.D. program directly, it is a requirement that they earn an M.S. degree along the way toward the completion of their Ph.D. degree.

Graduate Coordinator

Connie Cheng
connie.cheng@uci.edu
(949) 824-3562