University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science - The School

The School

SEAS is one of 10 schools and colleges at the University of Virginia. It is the second-largest school at U.Va. and is home to 1,993 undergraduates and 654 graduate students. Twenty-six percent of its undergraduates are women, and 24 percent are minorities. For the class of 2008, the average SAT score of matriculating students was 1353 out of a possible 1600; 76 percent graduated in the top ten percent of their high school class. Forty percent of SEAS students pursue a minor; 10 percent choose economics as a minor.

In 2005, engineering students placed first in Phase One of a national competition for computer chip design. The team bested teams from 27 other universities. U.Va.'s entry, "An SRAD Image Processor as a Reconfigurable, Temperature-Aware SoC Designed for Low-Power Operation", won a small cash prize for the school. The contest was sponsored by the semiconductor industry to improve the design of integrated computer circuits.

The Aerospace Engineering fourth-year class entered and won the 2005 NASA Vehicle Systems Student Design Competition with their unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) Mars flyer design. They received a small cash prize for the Aerospace Engineering Department, as well as the opportunity to present their design at an industry conference held in Columbus, Ohio during the summer of 2005.

Also in the summer of 2005, an undergraduate SEAS student drove 13,000 miles round-trip from Virginia to Alaska in a vegetable oil powered 1976 Mercedes 240D. For the year, the school was awarded $50 million in new research contracts by the United States government.

In November 2006, a new academic building, Wilsdorf Hall, was dedicated. The new structure is for collaborative research in materials science and materials engineering, chemical engineering, and nanotechnology. It also features a snack bar and coffee shop with an associated student lounge.

In March 2009, the school received a $10 million grant from NASA and the United States Air Force to develop the engines of new hypersonic aircraft that could fly at Mach 12 and at altitudes of up to 100,000 feet. Other aspects of the craft will be designed by two other centers receiving similar grants at Texas A&M and Teledyne.