UAH: News & Events

UAH graduate engineering program ranked best in U.S. - 1/26/2005

The graduate level engineering management program at The University of Alabama in Huntsville has been singled out as being the best in the nation by the American Society for Engineering Management (ASEM).

The award was announced recently at the annual ASEM conference in Washington, D.C. It was the second time UAH had won this national award. The university also won the award in 2001.

Behind UAH's first place finish was Western Michigan and Old Dominion University in Virginia was third.

"We have an outstanding engineering management faculty and their active participation helps bring exceptional and innovative concepts to the classroom," said Dr. James Swain, chair of UAH's Industrial and Systems Engineering and Engineering Management (ISEEM) program. "These practices are then passed along to our students and this better prepares them for a career in engineering management."

Engineering management is a discipline that integrates technical engineering and project system management skills to prepare students to lead people, projects and teams. In addition to traditional engineering coursework, students focus on business, economics, systems management and supervision.

UAH's engineering management program benefits from its strong faculty as well as the close working relationship with other areas in the program, such as system engineering, operations research, rotorcraft engineering as well as modeling and simulation, according to Swain.

The program also has an active research program in diverse areas including all aspects of team development, team assessment and metric development. Funding agencies include the Department of Defense, NASA and the Transportation Center of Alabama.

The universities were chosen based on academic reputation. The ASEM requires several points of criteria in judging a university's engineering management program, including: the program's specific accreditation standards, the faculty's involvement in ASEM and other professional organizations, contributions to engineering management practices and education; and recommendations by stakeholders outside academia that includes employers of the program's students and graduates. Member of the UAH ISEEM faculty who are particularly active in Engineering Management include Drs. Don Tippett, Dawn Utley, Phil Farrington, Paul Componation, Alisha Youngblood and Sampson Gholston.

Approximately 200 students are enrolled in UAH's engineering management graduate program pursuing the MSE or Ph.D.

For more information:
Ray Garner, (256)UAH-NEWS