The University of Southampton

Our history dates from 1946, when Professor Eric Zepler founded the Department of Electronics, Telecommunications and Radio Engineering. In the 60 years since then, the initial department has been transformed, encompassing Computer Science in 1987, and Electrical Engineering in 1999.

Today ECS is the UK’s largest research grouping in the area, with around 250 academic and research staff, and 270 research students. We have around 800 undergraduate students and over 300 MSc students. We consistently receive the highest ratings for our research and are funded by UK government agencies, the European Union, and companies and agencies worldwide.

We retain our remarkable reputation for innovation in research and have pioneered hugely ground-breaking developments, for example in agent technologies, energy harvesting and smart textiles, and Web Science.

The Founding Directors of the Web Science Trust are based at Southampton and Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, holds a Chair of Computer Science in ECS.

Our vision for ECS is of a vibrant community with a reputation both for the excellence and relevance of our undergraduate degrees and for the international significance of our research and scholarship, which exploits the synergies between our disciplines and embraces electronics, electrical engineering and computer science.