Texas ECE offers a PhD degree in 8 different academic tracks, but students can also take advantage of the immense variety of resources for interdisciplinary work at The University of Texas at Austin. PhD students will participate in state-of-the-art research along with faculty researchers. Holding a Masters of Science degree is not required to enter or even complete the PhD program. However, a student entering the PhD program without an MSE from ECE or a related field also may choose to pursue and receive the MSE along the way to the PhD with typically no or little additional effort beyond that already required for the PhD, although over a longer time period than a student within the MSE program. Students within the PhD program are expected to enroll in at least 3 hours of research problems or, later, dissertation courses each semester, which cannot be counted toward the MSE. As such, they will typically require 5-6 long semesters to complete the MS program.
Understanding, engineering, and interfacing with biological systems are among mankind's most important challenges, impacting numerous fields from basic science to health. Motivated by this larger vision, bioECE track is focused on the intersection of electrical and computer engineering with biology and medicine. It includes biomedical instrumentation, biophotonics, health informatics, bioinformatics, neural engineering, computational neuroscience, and synthetic biology. Associated faculty have expertise in diverse topics: cardiovascular instrumentation, neuroscience, neural engineering and the brain-machine interface, image and signal processing (feature extraction and diagnostic interpretation), health information technologies (data mining, electronic medical records analysis), VLSI biomedical circuits (biosensing, lab-on-a-chip), algorithms for large-scale genomic analysis, and molecular programming (engineering molecules that compute).
