Department: Electrical Engineering

Contacts

Office: Packard Electrical Engineering Building
Mail Code: 94305-9505
Phone: 650-723-3931; Fax: (650) 723-1882
Web Site: http://ee.stanford.edu

Courses offered by the Department of Electrical Engineering are listed under the subject code EE on the Stanford Bulletin's ExploreCourses website.

The Department of Electrical Engineering (EE) at Stanford innovates by conducting fundamental and applied research to develop physical technologies, hardware and software systems, and information technologies; it educates future academic and industry leaders; and it prepares students for careers in industry, academia, and research labs.

Electrical Engineering has effected societal changes at the heart of the information revolution. Electrical and electronic devices—realized in both hardware and software—are integral to daily life, whether in the home, in health care, in recreation, or in the infrastructure for communication and computation. Electrical engineers use theories and tools from mathematics and physics to develop systems ranging from smart electric grids, wired and wireless communications and networking, embedded systems, integrated electronics, imaging and sensing devices, to Internet-based information technology. 

The Electrical Engineering Department offers the following degrees: Bachelor of Science, Master of Science, and Doctor of Philosophy. The department also offers joint degrees in Electrical Engineering and Law (M.S./J.D.) and Electrical Engineering and Business Administration (M.S./M.B.A.). A minor can be obtained for the Bachelor of Science and Doctor of Philosophy.

Disciplinary Areas in Electrical Engineering

Research in Electrical Engineering spans a diverse set of intellectual disciplines and applications. The disciplines can be grouped into three overlapping and interrelated areas:

Hardware/Software Systems

• Data Science

• Embedded Systems

• Energy-Efficient Hardware Systems

• Integrated Circuits and Power Electronics

• Mobile Networking

• Secure Distributed Systems

• Software Defined Networking

Information Systems and Science

• Biomedical Imaging

• Control and Optimization

• Data Science

• Information Theory and Applications

• Machine Learning

• Societal Networks

• Signal Processing and Multimedia

Physical Technology and Science

• Biomedical Devices, Sensors and Systems

• Energy Harvesting and Conversion

• Integrated Circuits and Power Electronics

• Nanoelectronic Devices and Nanosystems

• Photonics, Nanoscience and Quantum Technology

• NEMS/MEMS

Interdisciplinary Research

EE faculty collaborate with researchers from other departments and schools across campus. More than a quarter of our faculty are joint with other departments, and a similar fraction of our PhD students have advisors outside EE. While the main applications of electrical engineering in the past four decades have been in information technology, EE tools and techniques are being increasingly applied more broadly to address major societal problems in areas such as:

Biomedical

Research in the biomedical area utilizes engineering approaches to address the unmet needs in diagnosis, staging, treatment, and mitigation of illnesses including cancer, diabetes, heart diseases, as well as brain disorders. Lower-cost, prevention-oriented health care delivery is critically needed, as well as new approaches to previously untreatable health conditions. Addressing these challenges requires discovering and creating fundamentally new approaches and creating new devices and systems for critical diagnostics (sensors, imaging), therapeutics (lasers, pacemakers, and neural interfaces), and analytical (high-throughput sequencing, healthcare IT) technologies.

Energy

Research in energy is motivated at the macro level by the rapid rise in worldwide demand for electricity and the threat of global climate change, and on the micro level by the explosion in the number of mobile devices and sensors whose performance and lifetimes are limited by energy.

On the macro level, electronic loads, such as data centers, smart appliances, and electric vehicles, are poised to overtake traditional industrial loads in consumption share. Renewable energy will make up at least half of the generation mix and drive adoption of novel technologies such as storage, fuel cells, waste-to-power and distributed generation. Our research investigates techniques such as demand response and the use of energy storage to reduce peak demand and address variability of renewable energy.

On the micro level, we are exploring energy efficient devices, power electronics, system architectures, and network protocols, as well as ways to harvest energy from the environment for wearable devices and the Internet of things.

For additional information, see the Department of Electrical Engineering's Research website.

Electrical Engineering Course Catalog Numbering System

Electrical Engineering courses are typically numbered according to the year in which the courses are normally taken.

Faculty

Emeriti: (Professors) Clayton W. Bates, John Cioffi*, Donald C. Cox, Robert W. Dutton, Michael J. Flynn, James F. Gibbons, Andrea G. Goldsmith, Joseph W. Goodman, Robert M. Gray, James Harris, Stephen E. Harris, Martin E. Hellman, Umran S. Inan*, Thomas Kailath*, Gregory T.A. Kovacs*, Marc Levoy, Albert Macovski, Malcolm M. McWhorter, Teresa Meng, R. Fabian W. Pease, Leonard Tyler, Robert L. White, Bernard Widrow, Bruce A. Wooley, Yoshihisa Yamamoto; (Associate Professors) John T. Gill III, Bruce B. Lusignan; (Professors, Research) Antony Fraser-Smith*, C. Robert Helms, Leonid Kazovsky, Butrus Khuri-Yakub*, Ingolf Lindau*, David Luckham, Yoshio Nishi, Arogyaswami J. Paulraj

(*Recalled to active duty)

Chair: Jelena Vuckovic 

Associate Chairs: John Pauly (Undergraduate Education), Brad Osgood (Graduate Education), Howard Zebker (Admissions), Kunle Olukotun (Diversity and Inclusion)

Academic Affairs Committee Chair: Joseph M. Kahn

Director of Graduate Studies: Brad Osgood

Professors: Nicholas Bambos, Kwabena Boahen, Dan Boneh, Stephen P. Boyd, Abbas El Gamal, Shanhui Fan, Bernd Girod, Patrick Hanrahan, John L. Hennessy, Lambertus Hesselink, Mark A. Horowitz, Roger T. Howe, Joseph M. Kahn, Christoforos E. Kozyrakis, Sanjay Lall, Thomas H. Lee, Nick McKeown, David A. B. Miller, Subhasish Mitra, Andrea Montanari, Boris Murmann, Dwight G. Nishimura, Oyekunle Olukotun, Brad G. Osgood, John M. Pauly, James D. Plummer, Eric Pop, Balaji Prabhakar, Mendel Rosenblum, Krishna Saraswat, Krishna V. Shenoy, H. Tom Soh, Olav Solgaard, Fouad A. Tobagi, David Tse, Benjamin Van Roy, Jelena Vuckovic, Shan X. Wang, Tsachy Weissman, Jennifer Widom, H. S. Philip Wong, S. Simon Wong, Howard Zebker

Associate Professors: Amin Arbabian, Srabanti Chowdhury, John Duchi, Dawson Engler, Jonathan Fan, Sachin Katti, Philip Levis, Ayfer Ozgur Aydin, Ada Poon, Juan Rivas-Davila, Gordon Wetzstein*

Assistant Professors: Sara Achour, Joonhee Choi, Daniel Congreve, Chelsea Finn, Mert Pilanci, Priyanka Raina, Dorsa Sadigh, Caroline Trippel, Mary Wootters

Professors (Research): Piero Pianetta

Courtesy Professors: Maneesh Agrawala, Stacey Bent, Kim Butts-Pauly, Emmanuel Candes, E.J. Chichilnisky, Amir Dembo, Utkan Demirci, Gary Glover, Peter Glynn, Leonidas Guibas, Brian Hargreaves, Tony Heinz, Ramesh Johari, Oussama Khatib, Monica S. Lam, Craig Levin, John C. Mitchell, Sandy Napel, John Ousterhout, Daniel Palanker, Julius Smith, Dan Spielman, Brian Wandell, Lei Xing, Yinyu Ye

Courtesy Associate Professors: Mohsen Bayati, Sigrid Close, Todd Coleman, Adam de la Zerda, Surya Ganguli, Hanlee Ji, Jin Hyung Lee, Marco Pavone, Ram Rajagopal, Debbie Senesky, Kawin Setsompop, Kuang Xu

Courtesy Assistant Professors: Grace Gao, Scott Linderman, Paul Nuyujukian, Simona Onori, Adam Wang, Keith Winstein, Serena Yeung, Matei Zaharia, James Zou

Lecturers: Zain Asgar, Raul Camposano, Steven Clark, Andrea Di Blas, Antun Domic, Abbas Emami-Naeini, Joyce Farrell, Leslie Field, J., Patrick Groeneveld, My T. Le, Max Yuen

Adjunct Professors:  Sherif Ahmed, Ahmad Bahai, Rick Bahr, Fred M. Gibbons, Dimitry Gorinevsky, Bob S. Hu, Waguih Ishak, Theodore Kamins, Ali Keshavarzi, David Leeson, Liam Madden, Georgios Michelogiannakis, Fernando Mujica, Narasimha Madihally, Reza Nasiri Mahalati, Dan O’Neill, John Provine, Stephen Ryu, Ronald Schafer, Ashok Srivastava, David Sussillo, James Weaver

Visiting Professor: Zhishen Cheng, Peter Stoica

Visiting Associate Professor: Waleed Alhanafy, Jianing Li, Seunghyun Lee, Severin T. Schneebeli

Visiting Assistant Professor: Jun-Chau Chien