Year in Review 2022-23

McKelvey Engineering

60%

of first-year students are women and/or students of color

41%

are women compared to the national average of ~22%

one-third are students of color

70% of engineering undergraduates pursue a second degree, another major or a minor

23%

of WashU student athletes are engineering students

A sound approach for effective gene therapy delivery to brain

Researchers have been experimenting with different ways to deliver genes to the brain to treat central nervous system diseases and tumors. One of the obstacles, however, is the ability to penetrate the blood-brain barrier while having minimal effect on the other organs in the body. Hong Chen, associate professor of biomedical engineering and of neurosurgery in the School of Medicine, and her team overcame that obstacle using focused ultrasound intranasal delivery (FUSIN). They found that the intranasally delivered gene therapy had comparable or better outcomes than existing methods while having minimal effect on the body’s other organs.

McKelvey Engineering faculty awarded $10.7 million in federal clean energy grants

The world’s changing climate has led the United States to set a goal of a net-zero emissions economy by 2050. Young-Shin Jun, Zhen (Jason) He, Vijay Ramani and Fuzhong Zhang, all professors in the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering, are working toward that goal with a combined $10.7 million in newly awarded grants from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The research projects will focus on creating new clean energy technologies that address energy production, emissions, critical element recovery and durable carbon dioxide storage.

Machine learning generates pictures of proteins in 5D

By combining machine learning with the laws of physics, researchers in the lab of Matthew Lew, associate professor in the Preston M. Green Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering, have been able to sort out the orientation and position of overlapping single molecules in 5D from a single image. The five dimensions in question aren’t new, hidden spatial dimensions; instead, a team headed by Tingting Wu, a PhD student in the imaging sciences program, designed a system that could tell her the orientation of a molecule in 3D space as well as its position in 2D, five parameters from a single, noisy, pixelated image.

new centers

Center for Biomolecular Condensates (CBC)

Personalized prediction of depression treatment outcomes with wearables

A team of researchers led by Chenyang Lu, the Fullgraf Professor in the McKelvey School of Engineering, and at the University of Illinois Chicago used data from wearable devices to predict outcomes of treatment for depression on individuals who took part in a randomized clinical trial. They developed a novel machine learning model that analyzes data from patients randomly selected to receive treatment and those who did not receive treatment — instead of developing a separate model for each group. This unified multi-task model is a step toward personalized medicine, in which physicians design a treatment plan specific to each patient’s needs and predict outcome based on an individual’s data.

‘Simple yet powerful’: Seeing cell secretion like never before

Washington University in St. Louis researchers have developed a novel method for visualizing the proteins secreted by cells with stunning resolution. The researchers, led by Srikanth Singamaneni, the Lilyan & E. Lisle Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science, and Anushree Seth, a former postdoctoral scholar in Singamaneni’s lab, developed the highly-sensitive FluoroDOT assay, which can see and measure proteins secreted by a single cell in about 30 minutes. With collaborators, they found that the FluoroDOT assay is versatile, low-cost and adaptable to any laboratory setting and has the potential to provide a more comprehensive look at these proteins than the widely used existing assays. The FluoroDOT assay, a plasmon-enhanced nanolabel developed in Singamaneni’s lab that is 16,000 times brighter than conventional fluorescence labels.

The Center for Biomolecular Condensates is an interdisciplinary center that supports researchers from engineering and basic sciences who focus on the cell. CBC members are leading technological advances and a better understanding of cellular level phenotypes that have an impact on modeling complex diseases and the development of novel materials based on active living matter.

Center for Women’s Health Engineering

Building on WashU’s strengths within the McKelvey School of Engineering and the School of Medicine, including the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology, the Center for Women’s Health Engineering advances novel engineering approaches to prevention, diagnosis and treatment in the field and train the next generation of researchers, entrepreneurs and policy leaders.

Joshua Yuan brings his robust research in energy and environmental sustainability, as well as experience in entrepreneurship, to the growing department.

Financials

expenses

Salaries & benefits: $66.2m

Gift aid: $54.3m

Central Fiscal Unit/space: $35.5m

Operations: $22m

Faculty & Research

105

tenured/tenure-track faculty

165 full-time faculty

9:1 undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio

total research awards (fy22)

36.9

Foundation: $3m

Industry: $1.3m

Institute of Higher Ed.: $4.5m

Other government: $205k

Other private sources: $239k

Federal: $27.5m

federal sponsors

NIH: $15.3m

NSF: $4.9m

DOD: $3.5m

DOE: $1.8m

NASA: $1.3m

EPA: $744k

$198.6m

total gross revenue $178.0m total expenses $19.0m

strategic operating & capital reserves $1.6m net results

sources of income (fy22)

research funding sources (fy22 expenditures)

Tuition: $123.9m

Grants & contracts: $37.9m

Gifts & endowment: $32.7m

Other income: $4.1m

new chair

Aaron Bobick, Dean and the James M. McKelvey Professor

McKelvey School of Engineering Dean

Yuan named chair of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering

63% Post-graduation employment

25% Graduate, medical or law school

12% Internship, co-op, research, other

$

45% of McKelvey Engineering undergraduate students receive financial aid

starting salary by major

Bachelor of Science reported average starting salaries for 2022 graduates

$82,400

Abbott Accenture Anheuser-Busch

Apple AT&T

Bain & Co. Boeing

Bloomberg LP Burns & McDonnell Capital One

Cisco Deloitte Consulting LLP

Environmental Systems Design

Epic

General Motors

Goldman Sachs

Google

Johnson & Johnson

JP Morgan Chase & Co.

Lockheed Martin Mastercard McKinsey & Co.

Meta Microsoft Raytheon Salesforce

SpaceX Tesla

Consultants

Biomedical Engineering

$74,125

Chemical Engineering

$103,000 Computer Engineering

$112,527

Computer Science

$84,036

Boston University

Carnegie Mellon University

Case Western Reserve University

Columbia University

Cornell University

CUNY

Duke University

Florida International University

Georgetown University

Imperial College

London

Northwestern University

NYU

Rice University

Royal College of Art

Stanford University

Texas A&M

University School of Medicine

Tufts University

UCI

UCSD

University College Dublin

University of Alberta

University of CaliforniaBerkeley

University of Chicago

University of Cincinnati

University of ColoradoBoulder

University of Michigan

Yale University

Electrical Engineering

$77,667

Environmental Engineering

$83,989

Mechanical Engineering

$83,260

Systems Engineering

Academic Programs

Biomedical Engineering

Undergraduate programs:

» Biomedical Data Science (minor)

» Biomedical Engineering

Graduate programs:

» PhD in Biomedical Engineering

» MS in Biomedical Engineering

» MS in Imaging Science

» Certificate in Medical Physics

Computer Science & Engineering

Undergraduate programs:

» Bioinformatics (minor)

» Computer Engineering

» Computer Science

» Computer Science + Economics

» Computer Science + Math

» Data Science

» Human-Computer Interaction (minor)

» Business and Computer Science (joint program)

Graduate programs:

» PhD in Computer Engineering

» PhD in Computer Science

» MS in Computer Engineering

» MS in Computer Science

» MS in Cybersecurity Engineering

» MEng in Computer Science & Engineering

» Certificate in Data Mining & Machine Learning

Preston M. Green Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering

Undergraduate programs:

» Electrical Engineering

» Mechatronics (minor)

» Robotics (minor)

» Systems Science & Engineering

» Quantum Engineering (minor)

» Financial Engineering (second major only)

Graduate programs:

» PhD or DSc in Electrical Engineering

» PhD or DSc in Systems Science & Mathematics

» MS in Data Analytics and Statistics

» MS in Electrical Engineering

» MS in Systems Science & Mathematics

» Certificate in Imaging Science & Engineering

Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering

Undergraduate programs:

» Chemical Engineering

» Environmental Engineering

» Energy Engineering (minor)

Graduate programs:

» PhD in Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering

» MS in Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering

» MEng in Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering

» MEng/MBA program

Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science

Undergraduate programs:

» Aerospace Engineering (minor)

» Materials Science and Engineering (minor)

» Mechanical Engineering

» Nanoscale Science & Engineering (minor)

Graduate programs:

» PhD in Aerospace Engineering

» PhD in Mechanical Engineering

» MS in Aerospace Engineering

» MS in Materials Science & Engineering

» MS in Mechanical Engineering

» MEng in Mechanical Engineering

Henry Edwin Sever Institute

Graduate programs:

» Master’s in Construction Management

» Master’s in Cybersecurity Management

» Master’s in Engineering Management

» Master’s in Health Care Operational Excellence

» Master’s in Information Systems Management

» Master’s In Project Management

Interdisciplinary programs

Graduate programs:

» PhD in Computational & Data Sciences

» PhD in Imaging Science

» PhD in Materials Science & Engineering

UMSL/WashU Joint Engineering

Undergraduate Program

Undergraduate programs:

» Civil Engineering

» Electrical Engineering

» Mechanical Engineering