Engineering at Johns Hopkins was originally created in 1913 as an educational program that included exposure to liberal arts and scientific inquiry.

The school's named benefactor is George William Carlyle Whiting, co-founder of The Whiting-Turner Contracting Company.

The Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering has consistently ranked as one of the top 5 programs nationally by U.S. News & World Report in recent years.

These include Clifford Truesdell, Owen Martin Philips, Jerald Ericksen, James Bell, Stanley Corrsin, Robert Kraichnan, John L. Lumley, Leslie Kovasznay, Walter Noll, K. R. Sreenivasan, Hugh Dryden, Shiyi Chen, Andrea Prosperetti, Fazle Hussain, Harry Swinney, Stephen H. Davis, Gregory L. Eyink, Charles Meneveau, Joseph Katz (professor), Lauren Marie Gardner, Gretar Tryggvason and Mohamed Gad-el-Hak.

Many of the landmark papers in the field of fluid mechanics (turbulence in particular) were written using data from the Corrsin Wind Tunnel Laboratory.

The part-time undergraduate engineering program realized its largest enrollments for a time after World War II when returning servicemen and women received GI Bill benefits for a college education.