University of Texas Austin

At the University of Texas at Austin, CSE is known as CAM (Computational and Applied Mathematics) but all six departments of the College of Engineering are strong contributors to the program. There are a number of special features of the CAM program at Texas that are noteworthy:

• CSE is an independent academic program leading to the PhD in CAM, which reports directly to the Graduate School. It has its own curriculum, although at present all courses are joint listed with some offered by participating departments, and its own oversight committee, which is involved in management of the program and all of its graduate students.

• Fourteen academic departments participate in the CAM program. The principal departments are Mathematics, Computer Sciences, Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, Chemical Engineering, Petroleum and Geophysical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Physics. Members of the CAM Graduate Studies Committee are faculty members from one of the participating departments.

• There is an organized research center associated with the program called TICAM: The Texas Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics. The mission of TICAM is to develop, organize, and administer programs in basic and applied research in areas of applied mathematics and computational sciences that deal with mathematical modeling and computer simulation.

• In the academic program, each student is expected to demonstrate a graduate level proficiency in three areas: Area A - Applicable Mathematics (this has primarily been functional analysis, partial differential equations, mathematical physics); Area B - Numerical Analysis in Scientific Computation (including a significant block of course work in computer sciences encompassing architecture, parallel computing, etc.); Area C - Mathematical Modeling and Applications (this is an intellectually rich area in which course work may be selected from one or more participating departments; typical Area C options are acoustics, computational fluid mechanics, electromagnetics, quantum mechanics, kinetic theory, solid mechanics, material science, and, most recently, computational finance). Students take written exams in all of these areas except Area B where traditionally there has been an oral exam. Each student's dissertation is expected to reflect components of all three areas. The PhD Advisory Committees must have representatives from all three areas, as does the Graduate Studies Committee that manages the overall program.

• Faculty in the program hold tenure in one of the participating departments. There is a written document, signed by the Deans of the Colleges of the participating departments, that guarantees that all participants in the program will be judged in matters of promotion, merit raises and tenure on the basis of their contribution to the CAM program independently of their contributions to their individual departments.