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CORVALLIS - Oregon State University has merged its Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and its Department of Computer Science into a major new entity called the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, or EECS.

The move is designed to boost international visibility of the program, strengthen faculty recruitment, and enhance the learning environment and interdisciplinary research within the College of Engineering.

The merger should provide more competitive recruiting power to attract top faculty whose research expertise spans departmental boundaries, said Terri Fiez, former head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of the new school.

"Emerging research areas often bridge the disciplines of computer science and electrical and computer engineering," Fiez said. "By merging these two departments into a single school, we are better positioned to hire top new faculty who have broad research expertise in these emerging areas. These people will then develop world-class research in these areas, which is where our future lies."

The College of Engineering emphasizes a collaborative approach to research, which often involves faculty and students in other OSU colleges and disciplines. Officials say the merger will facilitate that collaboration and result in stronger research focus areas, called clusters, and increased national attention.

"This merger of two solid departments into one strong school creates a critical mass in a number of key research clusters," said Ron Adams, dean of engineering at OSU. "The new School of EECS will strengthen these clusters as well as the core course offerings, resulting in our graduate programs being much more competitive nationally."

An example of a research cluster that will benefit from the departmental restructuring is the area of computer graphics, computer imaging and machine vision.

"Currently our faculty members in this area straddle the two units and research efforts are somewhat dispersed and require multiple laboratories with overlapping capabilities," Fiez said. "As a single unit, we can unite these efforts to increase efficiency and compete more effectively in the global research arena."

In today's computerized world of electronic devices, Fiez said, hardware and software are almost always interrelated, so bringing hardware and software research and teaching together in the new school recognizes this growing interrelationship.

One illustration of this is analog/mixed-signal design, which in devices like pacemakers enable hardware and software to work together to translate real-world signals (motion, sound, etc.) into data that can be analyzed and controlled by computers.

OSU's has an analog/mixed-signal research program that is among the top 10 such programs in the U.S., officials say. It is one of the research areas the college plans to expand as part of its effort to attain a top-25 national ranking by 2010. The new School of EECS is also part of the top-25 plan.

"This new school is another step toward achieving our goal of becoming one of the best engineering programs in the nation," Adams said. "As we build a top-tier engineering institution here at Oregon State, we are constantly looking for places where we can improve our impact. And this is definitely one of those places."

Similar mergers have been successfully implemented at other engineering schools, including MIT, the University of Michigan, and the University of California, Berkeley, which saw its national engineering ranking rise following the merger of its departments of electrical engineering and computer science.

The new OSU School of EECS, which will be housed in the Kelley Engineering Center when construction is completed, serves more than 1,700 students, including 1,400 undergraduates and more than 300 graduate students.

The school has 40 core faculty, nine teaching faculty and eight adjunct/visiting professors. Last year, new research grants and contracts in the now-combined departments exceeded $7 million, and to date 83 patents have been awarded, with 28 more pending.