About the Department
At the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Penn State, we serve more than 650 undergraduate students and almost 300 graduate students. The department's faculty members are actively involved in providing a hands-on education at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Our faculty and students engage in cutting-edge research with support from industry and federal agencies. Annual research expenditures are more than $500K per faculty member, per year. Our research programs are especially strong in areas such as energy, homeland security, biomedical devices, and transportation systems.
The department's 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 12th in the country for 2021. In 2022, the graduate program was ranked 15th among the 181 ranked mechanical engineering programs in the U.S.
