Wichita State University - Aerospace Engineering

Aerospace Engineering

The department was founded in 1928, students and faculty benefit from Wichita's rich aviation heritage and close proximity to major aircraft companies. It has longstanding collaborative relationships with Airbus North America, Boeing, Bombardier-Learjet, Cessna, Hawker Beechcraft, Spirit AeroSystems, and other Wichita aviation concerns.

National Science Foundation and U.S. News & World Report statistics, for fiscal year 2008, ranked Wichita State University as Top 3 among all U.S. universities in money spent on aerospace research and development, with $32.9 million in expenditures. That's an improvement from the previous year's fourth-place ranking, and it places WSU in the company of Johns Hopkins University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, which were first and second, respectively. While ranking higher than Princeton University, MIT and Stanford University.

The department teaches in the areas of composites, structures, Engineering mechanics, computational Fluid dynamics, applied Aerodynamics, and Flight simulation. Related facilities, in the Aerospace Engineering department and the National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR), provide students an opportunity to experience the use of aerospace design tools.