Upon speaking with Dean Tarek Sobh of the engineering department at UB, it became clear he could not be anything but pleased with the progress made in the department. With approximately 500 students in both undergraduate and graduate programs, as well as the new Ph.D. program, the University of Bridgeport has an engineering program that surpasses all other schools in Connecticut including the University of Connecticut and Yale. Also, with a ranking of 7th out of 22 for all New England Technical Schools, the most recent graduate number of 140 shows great potential for UB’s engineering program.
One of the greatest improvements for the department of engineering, according to Dr. Sobh, is the introduction of a Ph.D. program in computer science and engineering to begin next fall. Currently, the new program has only fifteen proposed students enrolled, but Dr. Sobh is confidant that the program will grow over time. Also, with the statistic that of the 300 engineering schools in the country, only 120 have Ph.D. programs, the dean commented that the nine years that was spent to get the program accredited and set up was not wasted as it allowed UB “to join the elite”. He has also guaranteed that this new program will generate some of the best in the field of engineering as it will be research intensive with a teaching requirement, a requirement for published scholarly work, and intensive exams. Dr. Sobh also stressed that other than the education, chiropractic and naturopathic schools, this will be one of UB’s first doctoral programs.
Of course, with the introduction of an elite Ph.D. program, the need for state of the art equipment was necessary a total of 18 laboratories were outfitted with equipment for robotics, fiber optics, communication equipment, and much more. While the financial costs varied from lab to lab, each lab received a couple thousand up to a million dollars in renovations. In response to these high costs, Dr. Sobh stated that while it is hard to justify costs without quality, he has assured that the investments put forward has paid off already as several students have put forward great scholarly work. One such student was graduate, Sarosh Patel, who last semester (Fall 2005) received airtime on News Channel 8 for his robotics project he created a robot that could be controlled remotely over the Internet from anywhere in the world. Projects like these and others spanning all fields of engineering have made the expense “quite worthwhile” as put by Dr. Sobh.
The Department of Engineering has also undergone expansion in its faculty numbers as well with the addition of three new professors last year and the proposal to hire three new professors in the near future. The three new professors include Dr. Gupta in electrical and computer engineering, Dr. Joyce Hu in mechanical engineering, and Michael Xiong in electrical engineering. The three proposed positions are in computer science, mechanical engineering, and technology management. Also, to aide in lectures, the general purpose computer lab has had installed an LCD projection screen.
With the addition of the new Ph.D. program as well as all the awards that the graduate students are receiving for their independent projects, the Department of Engineering at UB has nowhere to go but up while rivaling other engineering schools such as Yale, UCONN, and someday maybe even MIT.If you would like to hear about upcoming changes in your college email your request to John at scribe@bridgeport.edu
University of Bridgeport
Monday, July 14, 2025