Program Overview

Doctor of Philosophy in Software Engineering

The Doctor of Philosophy in Software Engineering is a 75 semester credit hour program beyond the baccalaureate degree. The program is tailored to the student, who must arrange a course program with the guidance and approval of a faculty member chosen as their graduate advisor.

Objectives

The Department of Computer Science offers a Doctor of Philosophy in Software Engineering. The doctoral program is designed to be flexible, allowing adjustments to be made as the student's interests develop and a specific dissertation topic is chosen.

Program Faculty

The program faculty includes:

• Professors: Farokh B. Bastani, Ovidiu Daescu, Gopal Gupta, Dung T. Huynh, Murat Kantarcioglu, Andrian Marcus, Yu-Chung (Vincent) Ng, Simeon C. Ntafos, Balaji Raghavachari, Bhavani Thuraisingham, W. Eric Wong, Weili Wu, I-Ling Yen, Kang Zhang, Michael Qiwei Zhang
• Associate Professors: Lawrence Chung, Kevin Hamlen, Zhiqiang Lin, Kamil Sarac, Rym Zalila-Wenkstern
• Assistant Professors: Alvaro Cárdenas, Cong Liu, Ryan McMahan, Benjamin Raichel, Lingming Zhang

Admission Requirements

The University's general admission requirements are applicable. A student may be admitted under one of two possible options:

• Admission Option One:
  • A master's degree in computer science or its equivalent
  • A GPA of at least 3.5 and GRE revised scores of at least 308, 153, 155, and 4 for the combined, verbal, quantitative, and analytical writing components, respectively
• Admission Option Two:
  • A BS in a related area that includes two semesters of calculus and linear algebra
  • A GPA of at least 3.5 in the last 60 semester credit hours
  • GRE revised scores of at least 315, 156, 159, and 4 for the combined, verbal, quantitative, and analytical writing components, respectively

Degree Requirements

The University's general degree requirements are applicable. The core requirements for the PhD degree in Software Engineering include:

• Passing a qualifying examination
• CS 6382 Theory of Computation with a grade of B or better
• Two CS or SE 7000 and above level courses
• Sufficient CS electives for a total of at least 75 semester credit hours beyond the baccalaureate degree
• At least 9 semester credit hours of organized advanced Computer Science electives must be taken at UT Dallas

Dissertation

A dissertation is required and must be approved by the graduate program. A student must arrange for a dissertation advisor willing to guide this dissertation. The student must have a dissertation supervising committee that consists of no less than four members, of whom at least three must be from the Computer Science faculty. Students must enroll in a minimum of 3 dissertation semester credit hours in the degree plan. The dissertation may be in computer science exclusively or it may involve considerable work in an area of application.