Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science | |
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Coat of arms of the School
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Former names | Engineering Department (1852–1932) School of Engineering (1932–1961) Faculty of Engineering (1961–2008) |
Established | 1852 |
Type | Private |
Academic affiliation | Yale University |
Location | New Haven, Connecticut, USA |
Dean | T. Kyle Vanderlick |
Website | seas.yale.edu |
The Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science is the engineering school of Yale University. When the first professor of civil engineering was hired in 1852, a Yale School of Engineering was established in within the Yale Scientific School, and in 1932 the engineering faculty organized as a separate, constituent school of the university. The school offers undergraduate and graduate classes and degrees in electrical engineering, chemical engineering, computer science, environmental engineering, biomedical engineering, and mechanical engineering and materials science.
Engineering education at Yale began more than a century before the founding of a School of Engineering. In the first half of the nineteenth century, chemistry professor Benjamin Silliman made fundamental contributions to the fractional distillation of petroleum, and his son, chemistry professor Benjamin Silliman, Jr., commercialized the process as a fuel source. In 1852, William A. Norton moved from Brown University to become Yale's first Professor of Civil Engineering, which established a faculty of engineering at Yale.
In 1854, two years after Norton's appointment, engineering became part of the new Scientific School, renamed the Sheffield Scientific School in 1860 in honor of Joseph Earl Sheffield. In 1863, Yale granted the first American Ph.D. in engineering to J. Willard Gibbs, who later taught at Yale and became one of the founders of the field of thermodynamics.