About Computer Science
Class of 2026 at the Senior Design Final Presentation
At a Glance
| Founded | 1981 (computer science taught at TCU since 1969) |
| Tenured & tenure-track faculty | 9, growing to 11 by 2027 |
| Programs | B.S. in Computer Science (COSC); B.S. in Computer Information Technology (CITE); B.S. in Data Science; minors in Computer Science, CITE, and Data Science; Ph.D. in Computer Science (launching Fall 2026) |
| Research Infrastructure | AI² platform — 16 NVIDIA H200 GPUs, ~307 TB high-performance storage |
A Department at an Inflection Point
TCU Computer Science has always combined rigorous technical training with the small-class, faculty-mentored experience that defines a TCU education. Today the department is in its most significant period of growth.
New Ph.D. program. In Fall 2026, TCU will welcome its first cohort of fully funded doctoral students in Computer Science — the department's first graduate program and a milestone for the university's research trajectory.
Rapid faculty growth. The department has grown quickly to nine tenured and tenure-track faculty — including two professors joining in Fall 2026 — and will reach eleven by 2027. These recent and incoming hires add research strength in AI for healthcare, cybersecurity, spatiotemporal data science, and explainable AI.
University-wide AI investment. Through TCU's AI² initiative, the department now has research-grade computing power on campus — placing students and faculty alongside the kind of infrastructure usually reserved for major research labs.
Training AI-Native Graduates
The market is full of people who can use AI. Our graduates stand out because they can also build the systems behind it — and judge when those systems are right.
We are educating a generation of AI-native computer scientists: students who work with AI from their first year, not as a crutch but as a force multiplier. They develop software alongside the same tools used in industry — GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, and Codex — train and fine-tune models on TCU's AI² GPU infrastructure, and build deep expertise through coursework in machine learning, deep learning, and data mining. By graduation, many have designed and deployed multiple AI-assisted applications, worked with cloud infrastructure, collaborated with real industry clients, and learned how to direct and supervise AI agents.
Being AI-native is not about relying on AI more. It is about accomplishing more because of AI while still understanding the computing principles underneath. The strongest graduates are not the ones who let AI think for them — they are the ones who know when to trust AI, when to verify it, and how to direct it effectively. That judgment, built on a rigorous foundation, is what employers are really looking for.
What Sets Us Apart
CS as an enabler across the university. Our faculty collaborate with TCU's School of Medicine, the Neeley School of Business, and departments in psychology, energy, and the sciences. Students gain not just technical depth but the ability to apply computing to real-world problems in multiple domains.
Industry-integrated learning. Senior design is the capstone of a TCU computer science education. Every student in our Computer Science (COSC), Computer Information Technology (CITE), and Data Science programs completes a year-long capstone project in their senior year — building real software for a real external client, on a real team. More than 50 of these projects in recent years have connected our students with industry partners across the Dallas–Fort Worth technology ecosystem. Real projects, real clients, real experience.
A community, not just a program. Active student organizations — the Computer Science Society, ACM Student Chapter, Women in Computer Science, and chapters of SWE and SHPE — create a support network that extends well beyond the classroom. Faculty sponsor students to attend national conferences and competitions each year.
Research Strengths
Our faculty pursue funded research across a range of areas, many of which connect computing with other disciplines:
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Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning — deep learning, transfer learning, explainable AI, LLM applications
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Cybersecurity — network security, AI-driven threat detection, cyber-physical systems, automotive security
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AI for Healthcare — biomedical informatics, EHR mining, drug repurposing, clinical decision support
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Data Science and Spatiotemporal Analytics — traffic systems, urban sensing, graph neural networks
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AI for Science — solar flare prediction, space weather forecasting, heliophysics
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Software Engineering — requirements engineering, model-driven development, software architecture
[Learn more about our research →]
AI² Infrastructure & Facilities
The department is located in Tucker Technology Center, Suite 341, on the TCU campus in Fort Worth.
Students and faculty have direct access to AI² (Accelerating Institutional Artificial Intelligence) — a $10 million, university-wide investment that combines TCU funding with Dell Technologies and AWS partnerships, and one of the university's largest research infrastructure commitments to date. The platform provides:
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16 NVIDIA H200 GPUs with ~2.2 TB aggregate GPU memory, interconnected via NVLink for large-scale deep learning and foundation model training
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~307 TB high-performance storage (Dell PowerScale all-flash) for the low-latency file access essential for GPU training workflows
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Hybrid cloud architecture — security-sensitive research stays on premises while flexible workloads route to AWS
This infrastructure supports coursework, senior design projects, and faculty research across the department's focus areas. For students, it means hands-on experience with the same research-grade computing environments they will encounter in industry and graduate programs.
Recent Highlights
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First Ph.D. in Computer Science approved and launching Fall 2026 with eight fully funded students.
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Strong graduate outcomes — 70% of the Class of 2026 (66 graduates) had accepted a job or graduate-school offer before graduation, per the department's senior exit survey. [See Outcomes →]
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AI² platform goes live — TCU's research-grade GPU computing is now operational and open to CS faculty and students for coursework and research.
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Best Paper Runner-up at ICMLA 2024 for work on parameter-efficient LLM fine-tuning (Afia Anjum, incoming faculty, with Los Alamos National Laboratory).
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Louise Dilworth Davis College — Computer Science's college was named through a $40 million gift supporting Science & Engineering across the entire college.
Explore
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[Chair's Message →] — A note from Dr. Bingyang Wei on where we're headed.
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[Our History →] — From a single 1969 course to a department launching its first Ph.D.
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[Undergraduate Programs →] — Majors, minors, and four-year degree plans.
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[Ph.D. in Computer Science →] — Admissions, funding, and research opportunities.
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[Research →] — Faculty labs, AI² infrastructure, and collaboration.
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[People →] — Meet our faculty, staff, and students.
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