The University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering ranks 19 overall among more than 200 undergraduate engineering programs—up three positions from its previous undergraduate ranking, according to U.S. News & World Report’s 2023–24 Best Colleges rankings. The list also ranks the Clark School 11 among public undergraduate programs.
Graduate students from the Alfred Gessow Rotorcraft Center won first place in the Vertical Flight Society’s (VFS) 40th Annual Student Design Competition. The team took the top spot in the graduate category with its design for a high-speed vertical takeoff and landing (HSVTOL) aircraft. The team submitted designs for a 48,000 lb mixed power tiltrotor, named Arion, that is designed to optimize stability and control while delivering dramatic improvements in speed and efficiency.
Researchers including Liangbing Hu developed a new cost-effective bio-adhesion strategy that can process natural bamboo to composites without the use of petroleum-derived synthetic adhesives, speeding up the process for a larger-scale composite operation. The novel bio-adhesion technique is based on in-situ lignin bonding, which has the capacity to process natural bamboo into a scalable, high-performance composite named “in-situ glued bamboo” (glubam). 
Miao Yu is leading a pair of National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded projects to deploy advanced sensors to better understand how climate change is affecting ice—and the water quality beneath—near the poles and elsewhere. Yu is working to enable measurements that are key to climate change and water-quality studies but are hard to gather year-round because of the installation and maintenance expenses for current monitoring instruments, and the difficulty of measuring water quality beneath ice.
Maryland Engineering students who built an innovative search and rescue drone were honored for taking home the top prize in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) First Responders UAS Indoor Challenge.

Representative Glenn F. Ivey (D-MD) presented members of the UMD Autonomous Micro Air Vehicle team with a proclamation during a special ceremony held at the Maryland Fire and Rescue Institute to commemorate their first place finish–the team’s second successive win in a NIST challenge of this kind.

Multiple news sources highlighted the winning team including WUSA9, NBC 4, and WTOP.
Land grant public universities are essential partners that invest in the welfare and future of their home states. They are instrumental in educating students and developing solutions to improve the quality of life of a state’s residents, in addition to addressing sustainability and impacting economic growth.

The Clark School’s partnership with the state of Maryland is critical to the success of this mission.