About the Department
In the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Penn State, we serve more than 1,000 undergraduate students and almost 400 graduate students. Our faculty members are actively involved in providing a hands-on education at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Faculty and students engage in cutting-edge research with support from industry and federal agencies. Annual research expenditures for fiscal year 2022 exceeded $16,500,000. Our research programs are especially strong in areas such as energy, homeland security, biomedical devices, and transportation systems.
While offices and facilities are located throughout many buildings on campus, department administration resides in the Reber Building. Faculty offices and laboratory facilities can also be found in Hammond, Leonhard, Research East, Engineering Unit E, the High Pressure Combustion Laboratory, and the NARCO Building in CATO Park.
Our mechanical engineering program continues to be one of the most popular at Penn State. U.S. News and World Report ranked Penn State's mechanical engineering undergraduate program fourtheenth in the country for 2022, which is in the top 4% of U.S. ABET accredited programs. In 2023, the graduate program was ranked seventeenth, which is in the top 10% of mechanical engineering programs in the U.S. The National Science Foundation has ranked research expenditures in mechanical engineering at Penn State as second in the U.S. in 2022.
