The University of Notre Dame’s College of Engineering educates skilled leaders and innovators and promotes transformational research focused on the greater good of humanity.
Guided by Notre Dame’s mission to be a powerful force for good, the College is committed to:
- educating students who contribute solutions to some of the world’s greatest challenges
- conducting ground-breaking research that enables people to live healthier, safer, and better-connected lives.
Engineering classes were first offered at the University in 1873, making Notre Dame the first Catholic university with an engineering program. The College of Engineering was officially founded in 1920, and early graduates in civil engineering contributed to a growing nation’s need for surveyors and designers of roads, bridges, and railroads.
In its first decades, the College achieved engineering “firsts” in a variety of fields — from the construction of the first hand-driven wind tunnel in the U.S. (aerospace) and the successful transmission of one of the first wireless messages (electrical) to the discovery of a new class of actinyl peroxide compounds (chemical) and demonstration of magnetic logic (computing).