Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Electrical engineers are at the foundation of all electronic devices—your cell phone, laptop, GPS unit, Kindle, LED lights, or even your car. Electrical engineers create technologies that connect the world. They work in various industries from power and communications to health care and avionics. Electrical engineers:

• Develop wind, solar, and traditional energy systems and make hybrid-electric vehicles run
• Design controls and communications systems for smarter robots
• Create biosensors to monitor crops
• Enhance image processing and diagnostics instrumentation used in hospitals
• Develop nanotechnologies to study microorganisms
• Design computer chips to speed up networks and processors
• Improve battery packs our soldiers use to run their equipment
  

Average Starting Salaries: $59,000

Famous Iowa State Electrical Engineers:

• Clifford Berry: An Iowa State grad student who helped John Vincent Atanasoff develop the world's first electronic digital computer
• David Nicholas: An Iowa State electrical engineering graduate student who invented the encoding process that helped make FAX machines a staple in office equipment.
• Thomas Whitney: This Iowa State alumnus led the Hewlett-Packard team that designed and built the first hand-held scientific calculator
• Donald Linder: An Iowa State alumnus who led the Motorola team that created the world's first cell phone
  

Areas of Study:

• Communications and signal processing
  
• Electric power and energy systems
• Electromagnetic, microwave, and nondestructive evaluation
  
• Microelectronics and photonics
  
• Systems and controls
• VLSI