Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Overview

Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) is a private research university in Worcester, Massachusetts. Established in 1865 by tinware manufacturer John Boynton and wire mill owner Ichabod Washburn, it is among the country’s first engineering and technology universities. With dynamic administrative and research facilities and strict admission policies, WPI is regarded as one of the most prestigious universities for undergraduate studies in the nation.

Worcester Polytechnic Institute Key Statistics

WPI’s academic structure is composed of four schools. These are the School of Arts & Sciences, the Business School, the School of Engineering, and the Global School. It offers undergraduate and postgraduate courses in social science, engineering, humanities, and technology management.

It has more than 6,000 students, including roughly 4,000 undergraduates and nearly 2,000 postgraduates. The university also employs over 400 academic staff members. Among its most notable alumni include politician Everett J. Lake, American educator James Smith, and Tsinghua University president Yiqi Mei.

Other Worcester Polytechnic Institute key statistics are its academic and administrative facilities that range from the Foisie Innovation Studio and the Beach Tree Stands to the Sanford Riley Hall and the Messenger Hall, which serves as a residence hall. It also has a library named the George C. Gordon Library which holds over 50,000 volumes of books, periodicals, serial titles, and other library materials.

Worcester Polytechnic Institute Research

WPI is classified among “R2: Doctoral Universities” for its high research activity. These research activities are funded by grants and fellowships from the Office of Foundation and Corporate Philanthropy, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. On average, the university awards a grant aid of $19,515 to its research teams.

The top fields of Worcester Polytechnic research are computer science, materials science, and engineering. Its researchers have also attended international research conferences and symposiums such as INFOCOM: International Conference on Computer Communications, EDM: Educational Data Mining, and ICRA: International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

The university’s most cited research publication is Proakis and Manolakis (1992) “Digital Signal Processing: Principles, Algorithms, and Applications,” which has 11,249 citations. Its second most cited publication is Zhu’s (2008) “Data Envelopment Analysis,” which has 8,795 citations to date.

Meanwhile, WPI’s third most cited output is Aarts et al.’s (2015) “Estimating reproducibility of psychological science.” This article which talks about the current state of reproducibility of psychological science and the replications of roughly 100 correlational and experimental studies was published in Science which is the peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and cited 6,212 times by students and research professionals worldwide.

Other Worcester Polytechnic Institute research facts and figures are its interactive centers and institutes such as the Center for Resources Recovery and Recycling, the Center for Industrial Mathematics & Statistics, the Center for Heat Treating Excellence, and the Center for Advanced Research in Drying.

It also has multiple research laboratories, which include the Embedded Computing Laboratory, the WPI Soft Robotics Lab, the Scarlata Lab, and the Kaminski Lab.

You can also learn more about the educational performance of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in our ranking of US universities & colleges.