University-Based Engineering Research in the United States

This paper reports results from an NSF‐supported survey of a national probability sample of U.S. engineering faculty on the nature and organization of their research activities. We analyze how engineering faculty spend their time, the types of research faculty conduct, characteristics of that research, how that research has changed over time, and the involvement of students in engineering research, based upon the engineering discipline, institutional research intensiveness and age of the respondents. These data and results represent a perspective on university‐based engineering research activities from the point of view of active researchers across most of the engineering schools in the United States.