CS Knowledge Base

The Grainger College of Engineering is the engineering school of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The College was established in 1868 and is considered as one of the original units of the school.

In 2019, the College of Engineering was renamed the Grainger College of Engineering, after the Grainger Foundation donated US$100 million as the latest of its US$300 million in donations to the college.^[1]

The College of Engineering is located at the northern terminus of the University of Illinois, occupying the Bardeen Quadrangle, the Beckman Quadrangle, and many nearby areas.

The Engineering Hall was built in 1894, and is the oldest surviving building on the Engineering portion of campus. It was designed by George Bullard, a university alumnus, and is an example of the Renaissance Revival style of architecture.^[2][3]

The Bardeen Quad is home to the Grainger Engineering Library. The building cost just under $30 million and has 135,000 square feet (13,000 m²) of floor space.^[4]

According to the 2025-2026 U.S. News and World Report's rankings, the Grainger College of Engineering's undergraduate educational programs are overall ranked #5 (tied) nationally,^[5] and its graduate educational programs are overall ranked #6 nationally.^[6]

• MiMi Aung, Project Manager for the Mars Ingenuity Helicopter, NASA JPL
• William F. Baker, civil engineer
• Richard Baraniuk, C. Sidney Burrus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University and member of the National Academy of Engineering
• Stephen A. Boppart, Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering and head of the Biophotonics Imaging Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
• Alan Bovik, Cockrell Regents Family Professor Endowed Chair in Engineering at UT Austin and member of the National Academy of Engineering
• Jack Kilby, who developed the first integrated circuit in 1958, for which he shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics
• Fazlur Rahman Khan, engineered the John Hancock Center and Sears Tower^[7]
• Arvind Krishna, chair and chief executive officer of IBM
• Mark Hersam, 2014 MacArthur Fellow and Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University
• Nick Holonyak, who created the first practical visible-spectrum light-emitting diode (LED)
• Sergio Verdú, information theorist, Shannon Award Laureate (2007), and member of the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences

The Deans of the Grainger College of Engineering include:

• Stillman W. Robinson, 1878
• Nathan C. Ricker, 1878–1905
• James M. White, 1905–1907
• William F. M. Goss, 1907–1917
• Charles Russ Richard, 1917–1922
• Milo S. Ketchum, 1922–1933
• Melvin L. Enger, 1934–1949
• William Everitt, 1949–1968
• Daniel C. Drucker, 1968–1984
• Mac Van Valkenburg, 1985–1987
• William Schowalter, 1988–2001^[8]
• David E. Daniel, 2001–2005^[9]
• Ilesanmi Adesida, 2006–2012^[10]
• Andreas C. Cangellaris, 2013–2018^[11]
• Rashid Bashir, 2018–Present^[12]

• Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
• Coordinated Science Laboratory
• National Center for Supercomputing Applications

• Official website