College of Engineering and Architecture

Howard University’s College of Engineering and Architecture (CEA) continues to play a vital role in producing our nation’s top engineers and architects. The CEA comprises the five departments of Architecture, Chemical Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Mechanical Engineering.

The CEA offers fully accredited Bachelor of Science and Master of Architecture degree programs. Graduate degree programs with abounding research opportunities offered in the engineering disciplines are Master of Science, Master of Engineering, and Doctor of Philosophy. Certificates in cybersecurity and other professional programs are also offered. CEA graduates possess the ability to apply their knowledge of mathematics, science, design and engineering to identify, formulate, and solve modern problems and understand the impact of architectural and engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context.

Mission

To serve our students by providing learning environments and curricula which foster their ability to formulate and solve problems, manage complexity and uncertainty

To develop sensitivities to interpersonal relations

To support the acquisition of strong technical competencies

To contribute to the solution of national and global problems through research, teaching and learning

Giving Opportunities

Be a major component of our work to address our nation’s socio-technological challenges! With your support through our Annual Fund, our students will see significant enhancements to their college experience.
Our top fundraising priorities include:

• Student Academic Upswing

  • Program Support
    Your support for academic programs throughout the college will benefit our students with additional advancements in visualizing, creating, designing and engineering with high-quality workshops, information sessions, lecture series, and interdisciplinary projects, as well as industry-grade instructional materials.
  • Lab Equipment
    Your support for the acquisition of new and upgraded lab equipment will further assist our students and faculty in keeping current with the latest trends in technology for greater academic and research productivity and higher quality creation and innovation.
  • Renovations
    Your support for building renovations will assist in ensuring that our aging facilities are kept anew and maintained at optimal levels of efficiency and productivity. With your support, together we can renovate and upgrade labs, classrooms, and common areas to provide students with an ergonomic and ultramodern environment designed to boost academic performance.

• Game-Changing Student Experiences

  • Travel
    Your travel support will aid our students in conference participation and other travel required to fulfill their academic, research and professional goals. Many of our courses include travel to local landmarks and other instructive sites. With your support, our students will have richer opportunities to make profound and sustainable local, global and national impact.
  • Competitions
    Your support will provide our students with the necessary resources to participate in local and national competitions, such as the Walt Disney Imagineering Competition, Steel Bridge Competition, Formula SAE Competition, NOMA Student Design Competition, and AISC Student Steel Design Competition, and continue to garner the award medals. This fund will cover all competition-related expenses to provide our students with the best possible experience as they embark upon the path of unceasing high-level success.

• Dean’s Innovation Hustle

  • Research Collaboration
    Your support will create a collaborative space with our top-level students and faculty to find solutions for contemporary local, national and global issues.

Key Statistics and Awards

• Student--faculty ratio – 8:1
• 40% women students 
• 38% increase in Ph.D. enrollment
• 66-point increase in ranking in the U.S. News and World Report 2019 Best Graduate Schools Rankings
• 27 countries represented in our student body
• 21 faculty fellows in 13 major professional societies, as well as 20 Architecture FAIA Alumni
• Twice the national average of engineering bachelor’s degrees awarded to women (ASEE)
• Mechanical Engineering Junior Melissa Douglas won first place at the 2018 Autodesk Design Slam Competition in Las Vegas. The competition had three “slams” or categories: Infraworks and Autocad, Dynamo, and Fusion 360. Douglas participated in the Fusion 360 slam with her teammate Shoko Kwata, an industrial engineering and design student from Japan, as the first all-women team to not only compete, but also take the win! Douglas competed against industry professionals and Autodesk engineers to design an advanced robotic training aid to support American football and soccer players with the latest in training technology.
• Chemical Engineering Junior David Gardner was selected by Chevron as a winner of the 2018 ScaleUp Sponsor Essay Contest. The Chevron 2018 essay topic focused on process safety and its role for a chemical engineer within the energy industry. The award included a scholarship, certificate, and recognition at the 2018 AIChE Annual Student Conference in Pittsburgh, PA.
• Computer Engineering Senior Cameron Lewis received the Black Engineer of the Year Awards (BEYA) 2019 Student Athlete Award for his high academic and athletic performance – mastering his skills in the classroom and on the court. BEYA represents global excellence and competitiveness in STEM (BEYA).
• Chemical Engineering Junior Jamaka Thomas won second place in the Food, Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology category at the 2018 Annual AIChE Meeting for her research submission titled: “Enrichment of Oat Protein by Means of Gravity and Electrostatic Forces”. (Thomas co-authored her submission with Chemical Engineering Graduate Student Dinara Konakbayeva.)
• Architecture Department Chair Hazel R. Edwards, Ph.D., served as chair of the Montgomery County Planning Department 2019 Design Excellence Award Jury. The purpose of the award is to honor projects that reflect the best and most exceptional urban design, architecture and landscape architecture that support greater quality of life, economic opportunity and environmental sustainability.
• Mechanical Engineering Professor Naren Vira, Ph.D., was elected Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), after nomination by Mechanical Engineering Department Chair Nadir Yilmaz. Dr. Vira’s nomination was supported by ASME Fellows from within academia, industry and government positions.
• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Professor Tepper Gill, Ph.D., received the 2018 R.M. Santilli Foundation Scientific Award for Unprecedented Advances on Isotopies. The R.M. Santilli Foundation Scientific Awards were presented at the International Conference on Pure and Applied Mathematics (ICPAM 2018).
• Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies and Civil and Environmental Engineering Department Chair Kimberly Jones, Ph.D., served as a committee member for the development of a National Academies of Sciences, Medicine, and Engineering report on the "Grand Challenges and Opportunities in Environmental Engineering for the 21st Century." The report was developed by experts to identify the biggest global challenges the environmental engineering field must address over the next several decades. The study also describes how the environmental engineering field—and colleges and universities—might evolve to better address those challenges.
• Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Associate Professor Robert Efimba, Ph.D., received the American Society of Civil Engineers National Capitol Section (ASCE-NCS) Lifetime Excellence in Service Award. The award “recognizes individual members of the Section who have made outstanding contributions to its work over their lifetime” (ASCE).
• Civil and Environmental Engineering Associate Professor and Howard University Transportation Research Center (HUTRC) Director Stephen Arhin, Ph.D., was elected Fellow of the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE). Dr. Arhin’s nomination was supported by ITE Fellows from industry, academia and government positions.
• Mechanical Engineering Assistant Professor Hyung Bae, Ph.D., received the 2018 DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA). According to DARPA, the program is geared “to identify and engage rising research stars in junior faculty positions at U.S. academic institutions and introduce them to Department of Defense needs as well as DARPA’s program development process”. As an awardee of the 2018 YFA program, Dr. Bae will receive $491,055 over the next three years for his research on “Polymer-based replicated multi-modal fiber Bragg grating (FBG) for Fentanyl detection”. Dr. Bae will develop a remote sensing platform which can effectively detect Fentanyl and related toxins in a challenging environment. The sensing platform can be used as a handheld device or mounted on a small drone due to its small size. The platform also can identify detected chemicals based on machine learning algorithms.
• The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a three-year grant of $1,000,000 to Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Associate Professor and Data Science and Cybersecurity Center Director Danda B. Rawat, Ph.D., and Associate Dean Moses Garuba, Ph.D., for their research project titled "Security Engineering for Resilient Mobile Cyber-Physical Systems".
• The District Department of Transportation (DDOT) awarded a five-year grant of $3,750,000 to Civil and Environmental Engineering Associate Professor and Howard University Transportation Research Center (HUTRC) Director Stephen Arhin, Ph.D., to conduct various traffic studies, traffic safety improvements and crash data analysis for the District of Columbia (DC) as part of the city’s Vision Zero Initiative.
• Chemical Engineering Assistant Professor Tao Wei, Ph.D., and Mechanical Engineering Assistant Professor Hyung Bae, Ph.D., were awarded $786K by the NSF for their research project titled: “EiR: Understanding Interactions of Gold and Silver Nanoparticles with Proteins to Achieve Optimum Surface Plasmon Effect.” Through their research, Dr. Wei and Dr. Bae will develop novel detection devices that are highly sensitive to the nano-particle and protein interactions in diseases such as Alzheimer’s and various types of cancer. Dr. Wei and Dr. Bae, along with fellow researchers, will work to ensure the disease detection devices are cost-effective as well as being effective in detecting diseases in their early stages.
• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Assistant Professor Gedare Bloom, Ph.D., was awarded $1M by the NSF for his research project titled: “CICI: SSC: Real-Time Operating System and Network Security for Scientific Middleware.” Dr. Bloom’s research will transform the security landscape of scientific cyber-physical systems (CPS) to protect sensitive and other data from active cyber threats as well as errors such as router misconfigurations. This transformation will occur through enhancements to Real-Time Executive for Multiprocessor Systems (RTEMS) and the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) in open-source real-time operating system (RTOS) software and middleware used by the scientific community.
• Mechanical Engineering Alumna Aprille Joy Ericsson (M.S. ’90; Ph.D. ’95) was named 2018 Distinguished Alumna of the International Engineering Society, Tau Beta Pi. Dr. Ericsson was nominated by the Howard University DC Alpha Chapter of Tau Beta Pi. The DC Alpha Chapter acknowledged Dr. Ericsson for “her lifelong efforts as a forceful agent for change and her promotion and advancement of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) among youth, especially minorities and women” (Howard Newsroom). According to the Tau Beta Pi Association, Dr. Ericsson has been recognized “as one of the most powerful women engineers in the world” (Howard Newsroom). This outstanding award is one of many for Dr. Ericsson, some of which were breakthroughs for minorities, as she was the first minority to receive the Washington Award of the Western Society of Engineers.