Skip to main content

About us

A&A quick facts

Every day the future is expanding in our labs. From the development of advanced unoccupied aerial vehicles to new aerodynamic techniques and unconventional space propulsion concepts, the faculty and students of UW Aero & Astro are honing the cutting edge of tomorrow's technologies.

Undergraduate enrollment

224

Undergraduate enrollment
2023-24

23%

Women

16%

Underrepresented minorities

74

BSAAE degrees awarded 2022-23


Graduate enrollment

252

Graduate enrollment
2020-2021

16%

Women

15%

Underrepresented minorities

21

MSAA degrees awarded 2022-23

23

MAE degrees awarded 2022-23

8

Ph.D. degrees awarded 2022-23

Under-represented Minority (URM) Status: This breakdown splits the students according to whether or not they are part of an under-represented minority. A student will be considered part of an underrepresented minority if that student reports belonging to one or more of the following ethnic/racial groups: Hispanic, Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, American Indian, African-American.

Recent student achievements

  • Brooke Owens Fellowship
  • Mary Gates Research Scholarship
  • NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship
  • SAE Doctoral Engineering Fellowship
  • Air Force Research Laboratory Space Scholar
  • Multiple National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellows
  • Clean Energy Institute Graduate Fellow
  • Lemelson-MIT Student Prize
  • National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellows
  • Air Force Research Laboratory Space Scholar
  • Department of Defense SMART Scholar
  • Josephine de Karman Fellow
  • UW Husky 100
  • National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Fellows
  • Forbes Magazine's "30 Under 30" Awardee

Quick history

The University of Washington’s William E. Boeing Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics (A&A) has helped shape one of the most influential and dynamic aerospace regions over the past century.

1917

Boeing Wind Tunnel (now the Aerodynamics Laboratory) built in 1917 at the UW. In 1921, Frederick Kirsten build the first cycloidal propeller model and tested it in the Wind Tunnel.
1929
UW starts one of the first Aeronautical Engineering departments in the nation, one of seven originally established with the help of the Guggenheim Fund for the Advancement of Aeronautics.
1936
Kirsten Wind Tunnel built; formal testing begins in 1939 with the North American AT-6 "Texan."
1956
Professor Harold Martin co-authors the seminal paper introducing the Finite Element Method.
1961
"Astronautics" added to department name in 1961.
1966
NASA grants $1.5 million in 1966 to build new Aerospace Research Laboratory Building (now AERB) dedicated in 1970.