The faculty of the department strives to offer graduate courses that will challenge the students’ capabilities, inform them of cutting-edge innovations, and develop in them an appreciation of the deep beauty and history of our discipline. Toward these ends, our curriculum has three goals:
  • To ensure that all graduates possess a broad knowledge of the fundamentals that underlie Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.
  • To ensure that all graduates have a deep knowledge within one of the department’s three disciplines.
  • To provide sufficient flexibility within our program for interdisciplinary students, acknowledging the great diversity within MAE and its emerging areas.
Graduate students in our program choose a field of study from one of the following three disciplines:
  • Solid Mechanics
  • Dynamical Systems & Control
  • Thermofluids
To ensure depth, students in the MS and PhD program are required to take three Core courses from the selected Discipline chosen.  A description of the Core courses for each discipline is given below. To ensure breadth, students must take courses from disciplines outside their field of study (one for MS and two for PhD).  Students must also take an Engineering Analysis course from an approved list covering a broad array of analytical and computational techniques. These requirements do not apply to Masters of Engineering students (see below for details regarding this program).

The Core course requirement in the Thermofluids track are the following three courses: MAE 610 – Thermomechanics, MAE 631 – Fluid Mechanics I, and MAE 611 – Heat and Mass Transport Phenomena The Core course requirement in the Solid Mechanics track are:  MAE 602 – Continuum Mechanics with Applications AND any two courses from the following list:

MAE 607 - Theory of Elasticity
MAE 608 - Constitutive Modeling of Biosystems
AM 708 - Inelastic Solid Mechanics
AM 714 - Nonlinear Elasticity Theory

The Core course requirements in the Dynamical Systems and Controls track are one course from each of the following three categories:

Category       Courses
Dynamics MAE 621 - Analytical Dynamics
MAE 625 - Multibody Mechanical Systems
Systems MAE 652 - Linear State Space Systems
MAE 623 - Vibrations
Control MAE 651 - Linear Automatic Control Systems
MAE 755 - Multivariable Control

The approved Engineering Analysis courses cover a variety of analytical and computational results useful for investigation across the department’s disciplines:

MAE 641: Engineering Analysis I
MAE 642: Engineering Analysis II
MAE 643: Probability & Statistics for Engineers
MAE 671: Finite Element Analysis
MAE 672: Computational Fluid Dynamics

  • 30 credits of graduate coursework
  • 18 credits from Mechanical and Aerospace (MAE) graduate classes
  • No more than 9 credits from 500 level classes
  • No more than 6 credits from 500 level MAE classes
Course Requirements – Master of Science
  • Three Core courses from the Discipline defined as the students field of study (as detailed for each Discipline)
  • One Core course from a MAE Discipline outside the students field of study
  • One Engineering Analysis class
  • Any three graduate classes
  • No more than 9 credits from 500 level classes
  • No more than 6 credits from 500 level MAE classes
Course Requirements – Doctor of Philosophy
  • Three Core courses from the Discipline defined as the students field of study (as detailed for each Discipline)
  • One Core course from a MAE Discipline outside the students field of study
  • Either one Core course from the third MAE Discipline or a graduate course in either another SEAS department or a Math or Science graduate course outside the SEAS
  • One Engineering Analysis class
  • Any six graduate classes
  • No more than 9 credits from 500 level classes
  • No more than 6 credits from 500 level MAE classes
Updated: May 2007