Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins was the nation’s first research university and its influence on American higher education has been profound. Since its inception, the university’s commitment to excellence has firmly established the university as a leader in both research and education.

Mechanical Engineering was one of the three engineering concentrations first offered at Hopkins in the early 1900s. Since that time, the department’s contributions to engineering education and research at the university have been ground-breaking.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Johns Hopkins Mechanics and Materials Science Department (precursor to several of today’s engineering departments at Hopkins, including Mechanical Engineering) led the fields of continuum mechanics, theoretical and experimental fluid and solid mechanics, and thermodynamics.

Many of today’s academic leaders in engineering and applied mathematics departments in universities world-over were either students, postdocs, or visiting faculty at Johns Hopkins (several are members of the prestigious Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars).

Today, the Johns Hopkins Department of Mechanical Engineering community encompasses about 500 people – faculty members, undergraduate students, graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, visiting scholars, and staff members who contribute to an exciting environment for learning and discovery.