The Department of Industrial Engineering (IE) is added, offering three specialties: engineering economy, engineering statistics and quality control, and data processing.

The ME Department develops a program in nuclear engineering under Professor George Leppert. The main nuclear engineering laboratory is based in the old Ryan Lab.

Frederick Terman is appointed as university provost.

John Linvill joins the faculty and establishes the Solid-State Electronics Laboratory.

The Construction Engineering and Management program is formed by Professors Oglesby and Fondahl, and offers one of the first graduate degrees in construction management. Allen Petersen teaches the first Stanford courses in digital and analog computing. Students have a single try to run their IBM cards on the machine, which has two kilobytes of memory. William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, founds Shockley Transistor. Two years later eight engineers leave to found Fairchild Semiconductor, which in turn spawns Intel Corporation. Shockley is a SoE professor from 1958 to 1975, and shares the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics.