William Batchelor

Department Head & Professor

It is my pleasure to welcome you to the web pages of the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Mississippi State. We are a strong department with a proud history and a promising future. Consistent with the landgrant mission, we have a threefold focus: teaching (the College of Engineering and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences), research (the Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station), and service (MSU-Extension).

We offer undergraduate degrees in Biological Engineering and Agricultural Engineering Technology and Business and graduate degrees in Biological Engineering (M.S.) and Engineering (Ph.D.). In 2001, our department began the administration of the new interdisciplinary graduate degrees (M.S. and Ph.D.) in Biomedical Engineering and we are excited to be the only graduate Biomedical Engineering program in the state.

If you are on campus, you can visit us in the Agricultural and Biological Engineering Building, at 130 Creelman Street. We have been located here since December 18, 2007, prior to this date since 1950 we had been located in the Howell Engineering Building. We currently have approximately 42,000 square feet of teaching, research, and office space and serve an undergraduate population of over 225 students and over 25 graduate students. We have research laboratories in Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering, Environmental Engineering Water Quality, Renewable Bio-Energy, Cotton Ginning, and Precision Agriculture.

The greatest strength of our department and what has helped make us one of the leading Ag and Bio Engineering programs in the Southeast is our rich diversity. We are a unified mix of students, faculty, and staff with a complementary set of varying backgrounds and expertise that makes our total effort greater than the mere sum of our parts. We are focused on biological systems and that makes our engineering perspective unique. We study agricultural crop production, environmental engineering and animal waste issues, biomedical engineering and medical topics, and biomass-based energy systems. All of these have the common thread of biology and engineering: hence Biological Engineering.

As we begin the new century, our commitment is to be the best program we can possibly be and to serve the students and the people of the state and region in providing engineering research, learning, and service for the biological sciences.

William D. Batchelor
Department Head & Professor