Academic Information

CCNY campus

The City University of New York, the nation’s largest university, consists of eleven senior colleges (of which City College is one), six community colleges, a law school, a medical school and the Graduate School and University Center. Nearly 200,000 students are enrolled in degree credit courses, and another 204,000 are enrolled in adult and continuing education courses at campuses throughout the CUNY system.The Grove School of Engineering, originally established in 1919, is one of the leading engineering schools in the country.

It is currently the only public institution in New York City offering a variety of engineering disciplines consisting of:

  • Biomedical Engineering
  • Chemical Engineering
  • Civil Engineering
  • Computer Science
  • Electrical Engineering
  • Mechanical Engineering

School of Engineering graduates are well represented at major academic institutions and in industry, i.e. Andrew Grove, co-founder of Intel Corporation (class of 1960). City College of CUNY has more than a 150-year history of dedication to excellence in education and continues to fulfill its tradition of preparing leaders for the future. Seven City College graduates have won the Nobel Prize, a record that no other public college or university can match. Nationally, the City College ranks fourth in the total number of graduates in all disciplines who have gone on to earn the Ph.D. and ranks first in chemistry, economics and psychology. It also ranks seventh in the number of alumni who have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and eighth in producing top-level executives in American business and industry. Furthermore, in recent years the City College has been the largest source of minority engineering graduates in the United States.

The Levich Institute is housed in the School of Engineering in Steinman Hall on the CCNY campus and shares faculty currently from the Chemical Engineering and Physics Departments. Levich Institute Ph.D. students enroll in an academic department, typically Chemical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering or Physics, although applications are encouraged from students interested in graduate programs in mathematics, chemistry, and similar disciplines. Students are required to satisfy the Ph.D. requirements of the departments in which they are enrolled, but they receive financial support while doing thesis research through the grants and contracts of the Ph.D. mentor and special fellowships. The Ph.D. mentor need not be a member of the department in which the student is enrolled. Students interested in doing Ph.D. research with Levich Institute faculty should contact the Institute or an individual faculty member at an early stage in the application process. More information on admission requirements may also be obtained through the CUNY Graduate School and University Center. Located in midtown Manhattan in the former B. Altman building at 365 Fifth Avenue, the Graduate School awards all the University’s doctoral degrees, and currently enrolls approximately 4,000 doctoral students in 31 fields of the humanities, social sciences, sciences and engineering.

Current research interests of Levich Institute focus on friction in flows of dense suspensions of  particles, the microrheology of complex fluids,  self-propelled (active ) colloidal engines, the dynamics and self-assembly of colloids  at fluid interfaces, microfluidics in lab on a chip devices, static and  dynamic transitions  of jammed states of non-spherical and deformable particles,  jamming dynamics in sediment transport,  neural networks of the brain and the spread of information over social networks.