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History
Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins was the nation's first research university and its influence on American higher education has been profound. Since its inception, the university's commitment to excellence has firmly established the univeristy as a leader in both research and education.
Mechanical Engineering was one of the three engineering concentrations first offered at Hopkins in the early 1900s. Since that time, the department's contributions to engineering education and research at the university have been ground-breaking.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Johns Hopkins Mechanics and Materials Science Department (precursor to several of today's engineering departments at Hopkins, including Mechanical Engineering) lead the fields of continuum mechanics, theoretical and experimental fluid and solid mechanics, and thermodynamics.
Many of today’s academic leaders in engineering and applied mathematics departments in universities world-over were either students, postdocs, or visiting faculty at Johns Hopkins (several are members of the prestigious Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars). Visit the list of former students and scholars for more information about these leaders.
Today, the Department of Mechanical Engineering is comprised of seventeen full-time faculty members, about one hundred and fifty undergraduates, more than eighty graduate students, thirteen post-doctoral fellows, and fifteen staff members. Ten members of the current faculty have joined the Department since 1990 and six since 1998 alone. This combination of established and energetic young faculty in a research-intensive setting provides an exciting environment for learning and discovery.