Department of Engineering Science | University of Oxford
About Us
Engineering teaching and research takes place at Oxford in a unified Department of Engineering Science. Our academic staff are committed to a common engineering foundation as well as to advanced work in their own specialities, which include most branches of the subject. We have especially strong links with computing, materials science and medicine.
This broad view of engineering, based on a scientific approach to the fundamentals, is part of the tradition that started with our foundation in 1908 - one hundred years of educating great engineers, and researching at the cutting edge!
Our graduates go off to a huge variety of occupations - into designing cars, building roads and bridges, developing new electronic devices, manufacturing pharmaceuticals, into healthcare and aerospace, into further study for higher degrees and in many other directions.
Our Research
The Department of Engineering Science has an international reputation for its research in all the major branches of engineering, and in emerging areas such as biomedical engineering, energy and the environment. The major theme underlying our research portfolio is the application of cutting-edge science to generate new technology, using a mixture of theory and experiment.
Find out more in our Case Studies and Research pages.
Our Institutes
The Department has five Institutes which lead the way for research and collaboration in different areas of engineering, including biomedical, thermofluids and robotics - visit their websites to find out more.
MEng in Engineering Science
Undergraduates on the Engineering Science course at Oxford spend their first two years studying core topics which we believe are essential for all engineers to understand.
Having developed a solid grounding in these, for their final two years they choose to specialise in one of the six branches of Engineering Science: Biomedical, Chemical and Process, Civil and Offshore, Control, Electrical and Opto-electronic, Information, Solid Materials and Mechanics, or Thermofluids and Turbomachinery.
Postgraduate Study
The research degrees offered by the Department of Engineering Science are MSc(R), DEng and DPhil. The opportunities in the Department for postgraduate study and research include conventional disciplines of engineering such as chemical, civil, electrical, and mechanical, as well as information engineering, applications of engineering to medicine, low-temperature engineering, and experimental plasma physics.
A long-term Engineering and Clinical Collaboration
Biomedical Engineering
How the Institute of Biomedical Engineering helped shape two decades of progress in Oxford’s Focused Ultrasound Programme, leading to the University of Oxford being named a Focused Ultrasound Foundation Centre of Excellence in 2023.
Rethinking Robotics: From Intelligent Machines to Intelligent Environments
Robotics
Professor Daniele De Martini's research spans robotics and artificial intelligence, focusing on perception, localisation, mapping, and decision-making for autonomous systems. In recent years, his work has taken a distinctive direction, challenging long-held assumptions about where intelligence in robotic systems should reside.
Heat Pumps cut energy use but increase peak demand
Energy
A study focusing on the real-world deployment of ground source heat pumps (GSHP) in retrofitted UK social housing apartments, has quantified the impact of domestic electrification transition on the electricity grid. The research provides data that could be useful for policymakers, as the UK progresses its net-zero roadmap, demonstrating both substantial energy savings and emerging infrastructural challenges.
Enabling Semiconductor Quantum Computing by Neural Operators, Transformers, and Meta-Learning
Machine Learning
Deep learning has achieved many breakthroughs across science and engineering disciplines, ranging from autonomous driving to protein structure prediction. The impact it has on quantum technologies is no exception.
From Melodies to Machine Learning: Detecting Musical Plagiarism
Alumna
Can artificial intelligence help us identify cases where one song copies another? Asli Saner, a former student under the supervision of Professor Min Chen at the Oxford e-Research Centre, set out to answer that question — combining her knowledge and love of music with the power of machine learning and data visualisation.
