UAlbany's Computer Science Reboots its BS and PhD Offerings
ALBANY, N.Y. (April 24, 2026) — After a revamp, the curriculum for the BS in computer science at the University at Albany is more digestible, flexible and customizable, with students having more options to make it their own.
At the same time, the Department of Computer Science rebuilt and streamlined its PhD program to promote interdisciplinary research and enable students to complete it faster.
The changes arose from feedback from students, faculty and industry and are designed to prime graduates for successful careers in both industry and academia, said Professor and Department Chair Jeff Offutt.
“We’re helping our students adapt to recent changes, particularly with AI,” said Offutt, whose department is part of UAlbany’s College Nanotechnology, Science, and Engineering. “Also, we’re setting them up to deal with changes that we don’t even know about yet.”
Here’s a closer look at the primary changes in the BS and PhD offerings.
BS in computer science
Two chock-full introductory courses have been split into three. This makes the material more digestible and gives students more time to absorb it all.
“We had just been trying to teach too much. So, they weren’t retaining the knowledge,” explained Offutt.
The number of required courses was reduced to enable students to take more electives, such as in artificial intelligence or analyzing malicious software. The University offers a half-dozen such courses.
“Now they can easily take three of those if they want,” Offutt said. “Before, they could only take one.”
Finally, biology has been added as a third science option, after physics and chemistry.
For more information, please click on BS-CS program revision here.
PhD in computer science
If the BS was a revamp, the PhD was a rebuild. As Offutt put it, “We threw out the old chassis and we started again!”
Foundational to the rebuild is a new course, Research Methods in CS, that’s taught by Professor Xin Li, a world-class researcher.
“Before, each individual faculty advisor was responsible for teaching their students how to do research in their topics,” Offutt said. “Now, they all get the same grounding.”
Moreover, there’s a greater emphasis on interdisciplinary research.
“We built in a couple of structural elements to encourage that, like the ability to have non-CS faculty on PhD committees and the ability to take courses outside of our department,” the chair said.
The other disciplines run the gamut from computational and atmospheric sciences to health, education, robotics and engineering. Indeed, given its omnipresence in the digital world, CS has many applications. Case in point: the associate director at UAlbany’s Atmospheric Sciences Research Center, who finds CS essential to her job.
The bottom line is that Offutt sees the big picture, and it includes CS: “Over the next twenty years, almost all of the interesting research will be done at the intersection of at least two fields and one of those fields will almost always be computer science.”
For more on the PhD program, please go here.