The University’s agricultural and biological engineering graduate program is tied for number one with Purdue University’s, according to the U.S. News and World Report, whose list of best graduate programs came out April 15.

K.C. Ting, professor and head of the department of agricultural and biological engineering, said the ranking helps with recruitment of undergraduate and graduate students.

“Students are very resourceful nowadays of getting information about the programs they’d like to study,” he said. “This kind of recognition will help in attracting higher quality students. It gives us the encouragement to continue to do great things,” he said.

Vaisak Parekatt, graduate student, said the rank is a great honor.

“What we do is very practical. It has implications in the real world,” he said. “You can take these technologies out and apply them, and it will make a huge difference. It’s going to make a huge impact, especially in the field of agriculture.”

Yuanhui Zhang, professor and associate department head, said the ranking is consistent with how it has placed in the past.

“We are always in the top five,” he said. “Our program has always been one of the top programs.”

Graduate students work on a wide variety of subjects, such as analyzing indoor air quality or studying biological sources of energy, such grass or algae.

Some graduate students are working on bio-sensors that test the health of animals.

“There is a breath analyzer that can analyze the breath of animals to tell the health condition of the animal,” Ting said.

The program receives about $3.3 million a year in grants from outside sources, such as federal grants and companies, including John Deere and BP.

There are 49 full-time graduate students in the program and 20 faculty members, Ting said.

The program is associated with the college of ACES and the college of Engineering.

“We are associated with two outstanding colleges. Each of these colleges is top-ranked,” Zhang said. “Therefore our agricultural and biological engineering is strong, just because we have a very strong agricultural college and very strong engineering college.”

Zhang said the program is the best in the nation because many of the doctoral students have gone on to be faculty all over the world and because of the number of junior faculty members recruited in the past few years.

“We have some very high-quality graduate students,” Zhang added. “Our faculties are doing great jobs.”

The program also has some great hardware, he added.

“Our students have access to supercomputers,” Zhang said.

Looking to the future, the program will have to adjust due to the budget next year.

“Due to budget issues, we have to become more strategic of what we do, visionary in terms of how to allocate our scarce resources.” Ting said.

Zhang said he would like to see the program grow to 70 graduate students, but their facility limits growth.

“Our building was built targeted at 25 graduate students. We are limited by physical capabilities,” he said.

He said even with the number one ranking, the program can get better.

“We know we are pretty good, but we also know we have a lot of room to improve,” he said.