N.C. A&T Launches New Innovative Graduate Program

A new graduate degree program in Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) will debut in Spring 2005 at North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University.

(PRWEB) December 5, 2004 -- Computational Science and Engineering is a rapidly growing field that involves the use of computational architecture to develop numerical algorithms or methods to study scientific or engineering problems. It has emerged as a powerful and indispensable method to analyze a variety of problems in research, production and process development, and manufacturing.

The proposed graduate program in CSE builds upon the current curricular strength and research capability at the University," said, Dr. N. Radhakrishnan (Radha), Our successful launch of this new program is the result of strong collaborative efforts among the Colleges of Engineering, Arts and Sciences and the Schools of Business and Economics, Technology, and Agriculture and Environmental Sciences." Dr. Radhakrishnan is Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development and Chairman of the faculty committee that designed the program.

The program, which is the only stand-alone CSE graduate degree program in the UNC system, will be highly interdisciplinary, drawing expertise and resources from various disciplines across the University and operating outside of a traditional department. The program is also the first among Historically Black Colleges/ Universities in the country and will enhance and supplement current graduate research and education opportunities at North Carolina A&T, as well as nurture cross-disciplinary interaction among both faculty and students.

The interdisciplinary curriculum will combine areas in applied mathematics, high performance parallel and scalable computing, scientific modeling and simulation, data visualization and domain areas such as physical science and engineering, life sciences, agricultural and environmental sciences, technology and business.

The program strives to develop skills and experiences that will enable students to master high performance computer programming tools as well as data acquisition and processing techniques. Students also will acquire computational modeling, simulation and visualization skills and use the acquired skills in specific application fields of science, engineering, technology and business.

Graduates of this program will be highly versatile computational scientists, engineers, technologists or business executives with a good understanding of the connections among various disciplines and capable of interacting and collaborating effectively," According to Dr. Radha,"

A&T has acquired a SGI 3900 and an IBM cluster computer with a rich set of application software, in preparation for offering this new graduate program and also assisting the faculty and students in doing research and consulting in computational fields. These computers together have a processing speed of about 125 gigaflops (billion floating point operations a second).

NC A&T State University is a learner-centered community that develops and preserves intellectual capital through interdisciplinary learning, discovery, engagement, and operational excellence.

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