Graduate Certificate Programs
A graduate certificate program awards a certificate of completion to an already-enrolled post-baccalaureate student who completes a defined and limited set of additional requirements focused on a specific theme. It provides the student with a credential, typically for use on a resume or curriculum vitae, to document study in a particular sub-field during the course of the graduate-degree program in which the student is enrolled. Programs require 12 credit hours to complete and a notation of completion appears on the student's official university transcript.
Graduate certificate programs hosted in the School of Engineering are:
Mobile Cloud Computing
Surgical and Interventional Engineering
Vanderbilt University is a world leader in mobile cloud computing due to our decades of highly-regarded research on distributed real-time and embedded middleware and our recent success developing and delivering massive open online courses (MOOCs) as part of the Coursera Mobile Cloud Computing with Android (MoCCA) Specialization.
The certificate program in Mobile Cloud Computing is housed in the Department of Computer Science. This certificate program is motivated by the rapid growth of interest in mobile cloud computing technologies that have occurred over the past decade due to the pervasive and profound impact of mobile devices in all aspects of our daily lives. Every day, hundreds of millions of people around the world use mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, to run software-reliant applications that direct them to the places they want to go, securely provide information about the people, locations, goods, and services near them, and let them interact with the people they care about and do business with. These applications rely on mobile cloud computing technologies, which are designed to run on smart mobile devices connected to powerful computing services that are accessible over commodity wireless networks.
The goal of this certificate program is to help build and sustain a workforce capable of developing, innovating, and operating mobile cloud computing applications, which is critical to achieving societal and economic impacts in key application and technology domains, such as mobile health, homeland security and national defense, entertainment, sustainable energy, the Internet of Things, and the Industrial Internet. In particular, successful mobile cloud computing professionals must master a range of complex software development knowledge, methods, tools, and skills. For example, they must be experts in specific mobile application platforms (such as the object-oriented frameworks provided by Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS platforms); understand low-level technical details, such as concurrency and synchronization, network and database programming, and secure data analytics; and able to create engaging web-based user interfaces that are intuitive to human users and that respond to how, where, and why mobile devices are used within particular application domains.
To earn a certificate in Mobile Cloud Computing, students must take at least 12 credit hours of courses listed below (each course is three credit hours).
Required courses:
CS 5251, Software Design Patterns & Practices
CS 5279, Capstone Project Course
At least two elective courses chosen from the following:
CS 5278, Software Engineering Methods & Tools
CS 5282, Mobile Application Development
CS 5283, Computer Networks
CS 5285, Mobile & Cloud Security and Privacy
CS 5292, Web-based Mobile Application Development
CS 5292, Cloud Computing & Big Data Analytics
Mobile Cloud Computing Certificate Contact:
Doug Schmidt, Professor of Computer Science
d.schmidt@vanderbilt.edu
Surgical and Interventional Engineering
The objective of this certificate program is to provide a broadening experience for the next generation of engineers and scientists interested in the creation, development, implementation, clinical evaluation and commercialization of methods, devices, algorithms, and systems designed to facilitate surgical and interventional processes and their outcome. Students who attain this certificate will be experts in the process of creating novel engineering solutions to surgical and interventional problems, and may pursue careers in academia, industry, startup companies, and in other environments where engineering creativity applied to clinical problems is needed.
The Vanderbilt Institute in Surgery and Engineering (VISE) involves eight core Engineering faculty in the biomedical engineering (BME), electrical and computer engineering (ECE), computer science (EECS), and mechanical engineering (ME) departments as well as more than a dozen primary collaborators in the School of Medicine. This certificate will capitalize on this expertise to provide both an interdisciplinary technical foundation and clinical exposure to students interested in interventional procedures and processes.
The certificate is available to current graduate and professional students at Vanderbilt. Acceptance to the program requires the approval of both the student’s adviser and the Director of Graduate Studies in the student’s home department. To earn a certificate in Surgical and Interventional Engineering, students must take at least 12 credit hours of courses listed below with at least two courses outside the student’s home department (each course is three credit hours). Plus, attend at least 75% of the VISE seminar series for at least 2 semesters.
Required course:
BME 8903, Advanced Therapeutic Bioengineering
or
ME 8391, Surgical/Interventional Engineering Design
At least three elective courses chosen from the following:
BME 5400/Physics 7805, Foundations of Medical Imaging
BME 7110, Laser-Tissue Interaction and Therapeutic Use of Lasers
or
BME 7120, Optical Diagnosis: Principles and Applications
BME 7310, Advanced Computational Modeling and Analysis in Biomedical Engineering
BME 8900, Bioacoustics & Ultrasonic Imaging
EECE 6357, Advanced Image Processing
EECE 6358, Quantitative Medical Image Analysis
ME 5271, Introduction to Robotics
ME 8391, Wireless Mechatronics
Surgical and Interventional Engineering Certificate Contact:
Robert Webster, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and VISE Education Director
robert.webster@vanderbilt.edu