Department of Automotive Engineering

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Welcome to the Department of Automotive Engineering at Clemson University. The Department is housed in the Carroll A. Campbell Jr. Graduate Engineering Center (CGEC) at the Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research (CU-ICAR). The CGEC is a unique state-of-the-art building equipped with full-scale vehicle testing equipment. Our faculty team of world-class engineers has developed a cutting edge research and educational program that focuses on the vehicle and its infrastructure from a systems integration perspective. The Department is committed to making meaningful contributions on state, national, and international levels towards addressing the challenge of providing sustainable transportation solutions and supporting the automotive industry.  Under the rubric of systems integration, we concentrate our education and research programs on areas critical to the advancement of sustainable transportation technologies which include advanced powertrain concepts, sustainable and advanced manufacturing, vehicle to vehicle and vehicle to infrastructure interactions, human-machine interface, vehicular electronics and telematics, and innovative business processes.

The graduate program in Automotive Engineering is a one-of-a-kind program. It has the distinction of being the first PhD program in automotive engineering in the US and produced the first PhD graduate in the country. The goal of the program is to produce technical leaders who possess the critical thinking, technical skills, and creativity necessary to handle ever-increasing product complexity, lead product innovation, understand and adapt to changing market and workplace demands, and function in a global environment.   The program is industry focused and draws on the engagement of industry partners working side by side with the faculty to achieve its goals. Students in the program have the opportunity to work on real world problems with industry partners through research and internship opportunities and graduates are in excellent demand. Graduates from the program gain employment at global automotive companies, suppliers, and innovative start-ups.

In September of 2011, the US Department of Energy designated the program as a Graduate and Technology Education (GATE) Center of Excellence in Sustainable Vehicle Systems. It is one of only seven such centers in the US. While we are proud and happy to receive this prestigious honor, we are also cognizant of the responsibility of fulfilling its promise. The goal of this center is to help overcome technology barriers in the design and development of high‐energy efficiency and low environmental impact vehicle propulsion systems through an integrated graduate education and research program. Through the integration of the center into our existing degree programs, we hope to train the highly skilled engineering workforce of the future that understands the underlying challenges in vehicle design and development for minimizing life‐cycle impact of vehicles, considering energy use and emissions, reliability, manufacturing, cost‐of‐ownership, customer preference and public policy. Students selected to participate in this center have the possibility of being part of the elite group of engineers and scientists that create technologies that are sustainable and address in a meaningful way, the problems, environmental and otherwise, related to global energy usage.

Come join us on this journey as we strive to become the finest industry-relevant research and education program in the world, specifically designed to produce the engineer of tomorrow, today for the automotive industry.

Dr. Imtiaz Haque
Founding Chair and Executive Director

Clemson University