The ECE Department is a young vibrant department that can trace its origins to the founding of the University of Illinois at Chicago, in 1964. In those days, faculty in the areas of electrical and computer engineering were divided between the Departments of Information Engineering and Systems Engineering. In 1982, a merger of these departments created the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. In July 2001, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering became a separate department.

The ECE Department has over 25 faculty members among them 12 are IEEE Fellows. The Department offers B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees to approximately 900 undergraduate students and over 300 graduate students. The Department is one of the leading research departments at UIC and is awarded over $5 million dollars annually in external research grants. The departmental research centers and laboratories are located in over 13,000 square-feet of research space. These facilities include a 3,000 square-feet class 100/1000 clean room used by the Microfabrication Applications Laboratory. Its computing resources include over 200 computer workstations.