Welcome to George Mason University's Department of Computer Science!

The CS Department at Mason is the largest department in the College of Engineering and Computing, one of the largest departments on campus, and the largest and fastest growing CS department in the Commonwealth of Virginia, with nearly 70 full-time faculty members.

The department has a world-class faculty with research strengths in all areas of computing and a strong commitment to teaching, and we are ranked among the Top 50 Computer Science Departments in the United States. Our faculty conduct cutting-edge research in their respective fields and have written widely used textbooks and software. Our faculty's excellence is reflected in the number of awards received for research (20 NSF CAREER and AFOSR Young Investigator awards, 7 Mason Emerging Researcher awards) and teaching (8 Mason Excellence in Teaching awards), and our faculty includes three ACM Fellows and four IEEE Fellows.

With a total enrollment of over 2000 students, the department offers two Bachelor of Science programs: the B.S. in Computer Science and the inter-disciplinary B.S. in Applied Computer Science; four M.S. programs in Computer Science, Information Systems, Information Security and Assurance, and Software Engineering with a total enrollment of 500 students; and a Ph.D. program in Computer Science with a total enrollment of nearly 150 students. The faculty of the department also teach and participate in the Volgenau School of Engineering's inter-disciplinary M.S. in Data Analytics Engineering and Ph.D. in Information Technology programs.

List of MS Degree Programs offered by Computer Science Department:

MS in Computer Science

Required Courses:

Course Number Course Name
CS 530 Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science
CS 531 Computer Systems and Fundamentals of Systems Programming
CS 583 Analysis of Algorithms

MS in Information Security and Assurance

Required Courses:

Course Number Course Name
ISA 562 Information Security Theory and Practice
ISA 656 Network Security
INFS 612 Principles and Practices of Communication Networks
CS 555 Computer Communications and Networking

MS in Information Systems

Required Courses:

Course Number Course Name
CS 530 Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science
CS 550 Database Systems
INFS 612 Principles and Practices of Communication Networks
INFS 622 Information Systems Analysis and Design
INFS 740 Database Programming for the World Wide Web

MS in Software Engineering

Required Courses:

Course Number Course Name
SWE 619 Object-Oriented Software Specification and Construction
SWE 621 Software Modeling and Architectural Design
SWE 632 User Interface Design and Development
SWE 637 Software Testing