The Grainger College of Engineering
Electrical & Computer Engineering

Student Research

Undergraduate Research

Undergraduates can find plenty of opportunities to participate in research at Illinois ECE. All faculty members are encouraged to include an undergraduate research statement on their ECE profile on this Web site - see a compilation of research statements.

However, if you are interested in the research of a faculty member not included in that list, feel free to contact that person with your ideas. A student-driven initiative called PURE can also help you find undergraduate research opportunities.

Students can earn technical credit hours by conducting undergraduate research, as well. ECE 297 is a one-hour research course open to freshmen and sophomores. It can be taken twice for a maximum credit of two hours, which will count as ECE technical electives. You are also allowed to collect six additional hours of research-related credit to count for your ECE technical electives. These can originate from individual study courses such as ECE 396, ECE 397, ECE 496, or ECE 499. Their equivalents in other departments can count as technical elective hours.

The ECE 496/499 combination is taken for the senior research project, culminating in a senior thesis. Students taking ECE 496/499 are also required to make oral presentation of their research findings in the College of Engineering Undergraduate Research Symposium. Credit for ECE 445 (required Senior Design course in EE program) will be awarded to students with senior thesis projects that involve hardware design or testing.

Graduate Research

MS and PhD students have the opportunity to work with faculty members whose research interests cover a broad range of topics, including:

  • Biomedical imaging, bioengineering, and acoustics
  • Circuits and signal processing
  • Communications and control
  • Computing systems hardware and software
  • Electromagnetics, optics and remote sensing
  • Microelectronics and photonics
  • Nanotechnology
  • Networking and distributed computing
  • Power and energy systems
  • Reliable and secure computing systems

For more information about graduate research, please see the MS and PhD Graduate Study Manual.