The College of Engineering is home to more than 75 faculty whose research tackles today’s most pressing local and global challenges. From coastal resiliency and offshore wind energy to robotics, nanotechnology, and water reuse, our faculty lead nationally and internationally recognized work that blends interdisciplinary discovery with user-driven, applied solutions to real-world problems.
Over the past two decades, the College of Engineering at the University of Rhode Island has received 16 CAREER Awards from the National Science Foundation—more than half of all such awards granted to URI faculty. Four faculty have also earned prestigious Young Investigator Awards from the Office of Naval Research. These national honors reflect both the exceptional talent of our early-career faculty and the growing recognition of URI Engineering’s leadership in key research areas, including resilient infrastructure, advanced materials, AI and cybersecurity, robotics, biomedical technologies, and naval and marine engineering.
This momentum is backed by a dramatic rise in research activity. Since 2017, external research funding has has an eight time increase, driven by interdisciplinary collaboration with government, industry, and academic partners at the state, national, and global levels.
Research News
2025 Biannual IEEE Underwater Acoustic Signal Processing Workshop - The University of Rhode Island held the biannual IEEE Underwater Acoustic Signal Processing Workshop last month. The workshop has been hosted at University of Rhode Island every other year since 1985. Formed as a collaboration between Naval Undersea Warfare Center, formerly Naval Underwater Systems Center, and electrical engineering faculty at URI’s College of Engineering. NUWC […]
URI team creates tabletop blast device to study long-term consequences of traumatic brain injury - The URI-built experimental model offers new way to look at TBI-related neurodegenerative disease.To help their colleagues in URI’s Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, Arun Shukla and Akash Pandey in URI’s College of Engineering were brought in. An expert in blast mitigation, Shukla consults frequently with the U.S. Navy, while Ph.D. candidate Pandey helps develop […]
Grad student seeks to build impactful medical robotics - In the final semester of his master’s degree program, Ali Rabiee, of Tehran, Iran, was searching for a Ph.D. program in robotics. He found what he was seeking when he came across Reza Abiri’s lab. “I’m passionate about building robots that improve people’s lives,” said Rabiee. “I focus on medical robotics, especially with assistive and […]