Creating technological advances that improve everyday life and change the world for the better—that’s what drives us in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Our world-class faculty members continually produce groundbreaking research in the areas of power and energy, computer architectures, embedded systems, micro/nano scale devices and materials, signal processing, machine learning and computational electromagnetics. We help students chart lucrative, satisfying career paths in industry, academia and government.
In these courses, teams of 4-6 students work together to integrate their engineering knowledge to design and produce prototypes for real-world projects provided by faculty, industry, non-profit organizations, and other project partners.
The University of Kentucky is well-represented on a list of the most-cited researchers in the world. In a database compiled by Stanford University in a partnership with Elsevier, 136 current UK scientists and scholars appear among the top 2% of the most-cited researchers across 22 disciplines. Of those 136 scientists and scholars, 20 are UK Pigman College of Engineering faculty.
The University of Kentucky Materials Science Research Priority Area (mRPA) has selected 11 researchers as recipients of multiple funding awards. Among the are four engineering faculty members.
Recent University of Kentucky graduates Lucas Gastineau and Asa O’Neal have been awarded U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships. The five-year fellowship provides three years of financial support, including an annual stipend of $37,000. The purpose of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) is to help ensure the quality, vitality and strength of the scientific and engineering workforce of the United States.
Electrical and computer engineering students from the UK IEEE student branch place first, second and third at IEEE SoutheastCon 2025.
The annual Pigman College of Engineering Faculty Awards ceremony was held on May 1 at Malone's Prime and Events. Awards were given in the areas of research, service and graduate studies.
For the first time, several engineering students from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) student branch at the University of Kentucky came together to coach and mentor a high school FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) team. Three UK students mentored about 10 high school students to build a robot from January through the end of March. The team then traveled to the Smoky Mountains Regional Competition in Sevierville, Tenn. from April 2-5.
