Overview
Top-10 Engineering School Feeding Austin Industry
U.S. News ranks Cockrell among the top 10 US engineering schools, with petroleum engineering at No. 1, civil engineering in the top five, and aerospace, chemical, computer, electrical and environmental engineering in the top 15. UT established its Department of Engineering in 1894; it became the College of Engineering and was renamed for the Cockrell family in 2007.
Cockrell runs on the main campus and the J.J. Pickle Research Campus with 297 tenure-track faculty, 668 staff and 8,517 students. The faculty includes more than 40 current and emeritus National Academy of Engineering members, three National Medal of Technology and Innovation recipients, and more than 90 NSF CAREER Award winners since 2000. It is part of the UT Austin Nexus.
Departments
Seven Departments and Where Graduates Go
Five departments carry donor names: Sanjay Chandra and family named Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) in 2022, and Fariborz Maseeh named Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering in 2023. Mechanical Engineering carries the J. Mike Walker name, Chemical Engineering honors longtime chair John J. McKetta Jr., and Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering carries the Hildebrand name.
| Department | Scope | Main Employers |
|---|---|---|
| Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics | Hypersonics, robotics, structures, computational engineering | SpaceX, Firefly Aerospace, CesiumAstro, NASA, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, T2COM Robotics hub |
| Biomedical Engineering | Imaging, biomaterials, computational oncology, drug delivery | Dell Medical School, Texas Medical Center, Austin biotech |
| Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering | Largest department: integrated circuits, embedded systems, electromagnetics, quantum optics, energy systems | Samsung, Texas Instruments, NXP, Infineon, Silicon Labs, AMD, NVIDIA, Arm, Apple, Tesla, TIE, T2COM PNT hub |
| John J. McKetta Jr. Department of Chemical Engineering | Energy, materials, polymers, nanotechnology, process engineering | ExxonMobil, Phillips 66, Dow, Air Liquide, battery materials makers |
| Fariborz Maseeh Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering | Water resources, geotechnical, infrastructure materials, transportation | Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), construction firms, water utilities |
| J. Mike Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering | Robotics, additive manufacturing, thermal systems, controls | Tesla (vehicles and Optimus), Apptronik, ICON, Hyliion |
| Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering | Drilling, reservoir engineering, geologic carbon storage | ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Permian Basin operators |
People
Inventors and Faculty With Industry Reach
John B. Goodenough joined Cockrell in 1986 and held the Virginia H. Cockrell Centennial Chair until his death at 100 in 2023. He shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for lithium-ion batteries; his UT group discovered the lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cathode in the late 1990s, now standard in Tesla standard-range vehicles, Megapack storage, BYD and CATL cells.
Bob Metcalfe, who invented Ethernet and founded 3Com, joined the ECE department in 2011 as Professor of Innovation and Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise, teaching startups and entrepreneurship. He taught at UT until 2021, received the 2022 ACM Turing Award in 2023, and is professor emeritus at UT and, since 2022, a research affiliate at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
| Person | Contribution | UT Link |
|---|---|---|
| John B. Goodenough | Lithium cobalt oxide (1979) and LFP cathodes; 2019 Nobel Prize | Faculty 1986 to 2023 |
| Carl Deckard and Joseph Beaman | Selective laser sintering (SLS), a founding 3D printing method, 1980s | Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering |
| Bob Metcalfe | Ethernet; 2022 ACM Turing Award | Professor of Innovation, ECE, 2011 to 2022; now emeritus |
| Edith Clarke | Clarke Calculator for power transmission lines (patented 1925) | First woman EE professor in the US, UT faculty 1947 to 1956 |
Pipeline
Graduates, Centers and Industry Programs
Cockrell graduates about 1,500 to 1,800 undergraduates a year plus several hundred graduate students, and many stay in Austin. An ECE graduate can work on a Samsung Taylor process ramp, a TIE packaging project, a Tesla program or the T2COM Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) hub within one labor market; mechanical engineers move among Tesla, Apptronik and ICON.
More than 25 research centers include the Center for Additive Manufacturing and Design Innovation and the Center for Aeromechanics Research, and TIE draws faculty leadership from ECE and mechanical engineering. Texas Engineering Executive Education (TxEEE) offers certificates in software, data science, AI and engineering management, and industry sponsors fund named centers, professorships and multi-year consortia. See UT Austin Industry-Academic Partnerships.
| Risk | Detail |
|---|---|
| Petroleum exposure | The No. 1 Hildebrand department depends on upstream oil and gas hiring; it is shifting toward carbon storage and subsurface energy |
| Faculty succession | Foundational researchers such as Goodenough have retired or died |
| Local concentration | A slowdown in Austin chip, vehicle or AI compute spending would hit several major employers at once |
Record
Dataset Record
- Sources
- Cockrell School of Engineering; Texas ECE; UT News; ACM; U.S. News
- Last verified
- Q4 2026