Engineering teaching and research takes place at Oxford in a unified Department of Engineering Science. Our academic staff are committed to a common engineering foundation as well as to advanced work in their own specialities, which include most branches of the subject. We have especially strong links with computing, materials science and medicine.

This broad view of engineering, based on a scientific approach to the fundamentals, is part of the tradition that started with our foundation in 1908 - one hundred years of educating great engineers, and researching at the cutting edge!

Our graduates go off to a huge variety of occupations - into designing cars, building roads and bridges, developing new electronic devices, manufacturing pharmaceuticals, into healthcare and aerospace, into further study for higher degrees and in many other directions.

The Department of Engineering Science has an international reputation for its research in all the major branches of engineering, and in emerging areas such as biomedical engineering, energy and the environment. The major theme underlying our research portfolio is the application of cutting-edge science to generate new technology, using a mixture of theory and experiment.

Find out more in our Case Studies and Research pages.

The Department has five Institutes which lead the way for research and collaboration in different areas of engineering, including biomedical, thermofluids and robotics - visit their websites to find out more.

Undergraduates on the Engineering Science course at Oxford spend their first two years studying core topics which we believe are essential for all engineers to understand.

Having developed a solid grounding in these, for their final two years they choose to specialise in one of the six branches of Engineering Science: Biomedical, Chemical and Process, Civil and Offshore, Control, Electrical and Opto-electronic, Information, Solid Materials and Mechanics, or Thermofluids and Turbomachinery.

The research degrees offered by the Department of Engineering Science are MSc(R), DEng and DPhil. The opportunities in the Department for postgraduate study and research include conventional disciplines of engineering such as chemical, civil, electrical, and mechanical, as well as information engineering, applications of engineering to medicine, low-temperature engineering, and experimental plasma physics.

EXPLORE

24 Nov 2021

Post-doctoral researcher receives prize for best ongoing research

17 Nov 2021

Clinical AI Researchers Win IET Healthcare Technologies Award

12 Nov 2021

AI used to recognise primate behaviours in the wild

09 Nov 2021

Novel approach to treating Parkinson’s Disease using low-intensity ultrasound wins award

08 Nov 2021

HumBugDB: Mosquito detection project releases large-scale acoustic mosquito dataset

02 Nov 2021

Engineering DPhil receives award for technology recovering precious metals from wastewater

29 Oct 2021

University students urge the UK government to look beyond 2050 when planning the path to net zero

27 Oct 2021

New global smart grid partnership launched to unlock local solutions to climate change

27 Nov 2021

Museum of Natural History Super Science Saturday

24 Jan 2022

MPLS Women in STEM Networking Event 2022

04 Apr 2022

18th European Mechanics of Materials Conference (EMMC18)

11 Jul 2022

Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School 2022

Biomedical Engineering

Oxford chemical and biomedical engineer and Director of the Oxford Centre for Tissue Engineering and Bioprocessing Professor Cathy (Hua) Ye has spent years developing technology to support stem cell development. Here she shares more about her latest work to improve the production process.

Water

Data centres accounted for around 1% or 2% of global electricity demand in 2020. All that processing power generates lots of heat, so data centres must keep cool to prevent damage. While some companies are using cool air on mountain sites and Microsoft has used the cold waters of Scotland to experiment with underwater data centres, up to 43% of data centre electricity in the US is used for cooling.

MSc Student

First inspired to study engineering by his parent’s constant struggle with patchy electricity provision during his childhood in Nigeria, Nwangele Godwin (Emeka) Chukwuemeka is now studying the MSc in Energy Systems at the University of Oxford.

Artificial Intelligence

The Moon’s polar regions are home to craters and other depressions that never receive sunlight. Permanently shadowed lunar craters contain water ice but are difficult to image. An AI algorithm now provides sharper images, allowing us to see into them with high resolution for the first time.

DPHIL

Nadja Yang is a Rhodes Scholar and student at Keble College pursuing a DPhil in Systems Engineering, where she conducts research on the Urban Bioeconomy, a concept to help cities become more sustainable and productive in terms of its biological resources. Nadja was recently elected President of European Young Engineers and 2021 winner of the McKinsey Achievement Award in the Womens Achievement category.

Robotics

The Oxford Robotics Institute has been awarded 725,000 to undertake research for the development of new technologies to operate in extreme and challenging environments.

Alumni

Corinne Stuart matriculated in 2011 and studied for an MEng at University College. Corinne is a Senior Mechanical Engineer for Dyson, previously working on electric vehicles and now on personal care products and sustainability projects. We spoke to Corinne to find out more about her engineering career so far.

RESEARCHER

Dr Tamara Sopek is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant in the Hypersonics Group at the Oxford Thermofluids Institute. Hypersonics is the study of very fast and highly energetic flows encountered by space vehicles, planetary probes and air-breathing engines called scramjets.

ALUMNI

How does L’Occitane en Provence, a business steeped in the poetry of the natural world, deal with the grim realities of climate change? Engineering Alumni Adrien Geiger, L’Occitane’s first ever Group Sustainability Officer, explains.

CLIMATE CHANGE

The SAT4CCS project, led by researchers from the universities of Pretoria, Oxford and Cape Town, aims to assemble detailed information on tailings across South Africa. The aim is to identify the total potential for sequestration in the South African mining sector.

ROBOTICS

A team of researchers at the Oxford Robotics Institute are developing solutions for legged robots to be able to perceive their environment and make intelligent decisions to move from one point to the other.