Electrical Engineering

Entry requirements

Students with bachelor’s degrees in the natural sciences, mathematics, or engineering are invited to apply for admission.

Through the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, prospective students apply for doctoral degree study at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). These programs lie at the interfaces of engineering, the applied sciences (from biology to physics), and technology.

When applying, select “Engineering and Applied Sciences” as your program choice and your degree and area of interest in the Area of Study menu. You must complete the Supplemental SEAS Application Form as part of the online application process. Please read the form carefully and indicate your specific interests only in the area to which you are applying.

Months of entry

August

Course content

Electrical Engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering studies systems that sense, analyze, and interact with the world. Electrical Engineers invent devices for sensing and actuation; they design physical substrates for computation; they create algorithms for analysis and control; and they expand the theory of information processing. Their practice is based in fundamental science and mathematics, and this creates opportunities for both theoretical and experimental research.

Electrical engineers at Harvard are pursuing work on diamond nanofabrication; quantum devices; integrated circuits for cellular biotechnology; millimeter-scale robots; hardware for machine learning; the optimization of smart power grids and other networked systems; disentangling brain signals and mapping brain circuits; distilling information from large stochastic datasets; and the fundamental limits of private information sharing.

Electrical Engineering Programs

Bachelor of Arts (AB)

Bachelor of Science (SB)

Bachelor of Arts (AB)/Master of Science (SM)

PhD

Fees and funding

5 years’ funding is guaranteed to all Harvard GSAS PhD students.

Applicants who are British citizens, normally resident in the UK and who are, or will be, graduates of a British university, are welcome to submit an additional application for a Kennedy Scholarship and/or a Frank Knox Fellowship.

An application for either award is separate from and totally independent of an application to a particular programme. Frank Knox Fellowship funding is advantageous in the taught-master phase of a doctorate. Both awards offer significant social and networking benefits.