The departmental research groups include:

• Energy Conversion Systems and Thermal Sciences - focuses on sustainable energy production and energy security.
• Energy Systems and Power Electronics - focuses on both fundamental and applied research in the interrelated fields of conventional electric power systems and electric machinery, renewable energy and distributed generation, energy economics and policy issues, power quality, power electronics and drives. The overall scope of research encompasses a broad spectrum of electrical energy applications including investor-owned utilities, rural electric associations, manufacturing facilities, regulatory agencies, and consulting engineering firms.
• High Performance Computing - Focuses on developing techniques,designing algorithms, and building software tools for a range of applications to achieve high performance, reliability, and usability on platforms ranging from desktops to supercomputers. Core technical areas represented in the group include combinatorial optimization, computational geometry, computational topology, discrete algorithms and data structures, energy efficient computing, fault-tolerant computing, mathematical/geometric modeling, numerical linear algebra and parallel computing. Application areas include computational chemistry, computational materials, computer graphics, cyber-physical systems, engineering design, medical imaging, mobile computing, reservoir simulation, robotics, scientific visualization and VLSI design automation.
• Mobile Computing & Networking - a computer science group formed to research ad hoc networks.
• Robotics - Robotics is an emerging area at CSM that merges research in mechanical design, control systems, sensing, and mechatronics to develop automated and autonomous systems that can be used to carry out tasks that are dirty, dangerous, dull, or difficult.
• Sensing, Communications and Control - an interdisciplinary research area that encompasses the fields of control systems, wireless communications, signal and image processing, robotics, and mechatronics. Focus areas include intelligent and learning control systems, fault detection and system identification, compressive sensing, wireless communication circuits, computer vision and pattern recognition, sensor development, mobile manipulation and autonomous systems. Applications can be found in renewable energy and power systems, materials processing, sensor and control networks, bio-engineering, intelligent structures, and geosystems.