I think your question is too general. For example, there may be institutions that have e.g. a great civil engineering lab while being mediocre at electrical engineering. And the same can be true of subfields of each engineering discipline (for example, I'm in CS, and it's common to see institutions that have a powerful group in one specific area of CS - say computer vision, robotics, NLP, theoretical CS - and aren't anything special in others).

I think you should look at what specific research you want to do and then check what labs are publishing interesting papers on that specific thing.

Perhaps I should have been more clear, I am a PhD dropout in Mech Eng with lots of CS and finance/econ exposure as I dropped out to join a bank. I want to do something cross disciplinary and vague ideas of systems science especially since I read Saltzer Kaashoek(sorry for butchering the spellings) Principles of Computer System design and sort of using a systems design approach to manufacturing processes and such. Like a lot of ideas of CS are from Engineering Management like JIT etc and how the design of networks is an evolution of earlier metaphors of telegraph and telephone systems.

To keep it short, how do I even find what I want to look for? Any tactics that you would want to suggest?