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CS PhD Program and Curriculum

The Computer Science Ph.D. program prepares students in the highest level of theory and practice of Computer Science, aiding with the development of research and instruction skills for positions in academia, industry and government sectors.

The Computer Science Ph.D. program produces professionals trained at the highest possible academic level in the theory and practice of Computer Science in order to meet current and projected market demands for Computer Science experts. CS Ph.D. students from the Department of CS at UCF graduate with proven abilities in research and instruction and have expertise suitable for positions in industry, academia and government.


Students in the program receive a broad background in the areas of programming systems and languages, computer architecture and computer science theory while specializing in a research area. Research interests of the computer science faculty include affective computing, applied perception, bioinformatics, computational biology, computational geometry, computer and network security, computer architecture, computer forensics, computer graphics, computer networks, computer vision, cryptography, data compression, database management systems, data mining, design and analysis of algorithms, evolutionary computation, genetic algorithms, graph theory, hardware/software co-design, image processing, machine learning, mixed and virtual reality, mobile computing, modeling and simulation, multimedia systems, natural language processing, neural networks, parallel and distributed processing, performance evaluation, programming languages, quantum computing, semantic web, software agents, software engineering and VLSI systems.

PhD Curriculum Requirements

  • A total of at least 72 semester hours of credits at the 5–7000 level. At least one half of these must be 6–7000 level and none can be undergraduate credit.
  • CDA 5106, COT 5405, and COT 6410, all with a grade of B (3.0) or better.
  • A total of at least 36 credit hours of CS or ECE coursework (Prefixes CAP, CDA, CEN, CIS, CNT, COP, COT, EEE, EEL, and ECM) and excludes Independent Study/Doctoral Research/Dissertation credits.
  • At least 15 credit hours of Dissertation (CXX 7980).