Tenure-track Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering: Climate-Smart Agriculture & Forestry Cluster, Fall 2026

Description

The Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE) Department (https://tickle.utk.edu/ise/) at UTK is seeking exceptional candidates to fill one tenure-track position at the Assistant Professor level starting August 1, 2026. This search is part of a cluster hire to add faculty across multiple departments with expertise in resilience in agricultural and forest systems (RAFS). The successful candidate may have a joint appointment with the School of Natural Resources . The RAFS cluster is part of the “It takes a Volunteer” cluster hiring initiative at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (https://research.utk.edu/cluster-hire/). The RAFS Cluster will support the resilience of AFS under environmental and economic constraints through research and education collaborations across disciplines and sectors. As part of this institutional priority initiative, new hires will part of an innovation hub that attracts and integrates existing faculty, researchers, and students from dozens of disciplines to develop economically viable and environmentally resilient AFS. Available effective August 1, 2026, the positions will include competitive compensation and a startup package.  The Knoxville campus of the University of Tennessee is seeking candidates who have the ability to promote an atmosphere where all members of the university community feel welcome and can thrive. 

This new hire will work on complex modeling and digitalization of agricultural/forest product supply systems with a focus on prediction and optimization of production-market-environment interactions. Examples of applications include modeling and optimization of AFS operations under uncertainty, design, development, and optimization of AFS supply chains (including closed loops), and byproduct value maximization.

UTK is the flagship campus of the UT system, land-grant university, and a public Carnegie Research 1 institution. As an 1862 land-grant university and as Volunteers, serving our state and nation is key to our mission. UT enrolls approximately 39,000 students at its Knoxville campus. Under a united leadership across the UT system, university campuses, and colleges, UTK is undergoing transformational changes focused on solving some of the most audacious, pressing problems our country and world face today.

The Tickle College of Engineering (TCE) is in the midst of an unprecedented period of growth and success, including adding over 30 new faculty to the college as part of ambitious hiring campaigns led by Chancellor Donde Plowman and Dean Matthew Mench. The college has set records in research expenditures, enrollment, incoming student GPA, diversity, intellectual property development, and USNWR rank in the past three years. New facilities include the state-of-the-art Zeanah Engineering Complex, the University of Tennessee Manufacturing and Design Enterprise (TN-MADE) facility, and the Innovation South building, now under construction, that will house UTK’s Fibers and Composites Manufacturing Facility (FCMF). TCE currently has 203 tenure/tenure track and 79 non-tenure track faculty in its nine academic departments and offers 11 undergraduate, 16 MS, and 15 PhD/DE degree programs. Affiliated with TCE and located in Tullahoma, Tennessee, the UT Space Institute is a hub of aerospace and defense research. The college is also home to eight research centers and three interdisciplinary institutes. With approximately 4,300 undergraduate and 1,500 graduate students, the college sits 29th among public universities in the most recent U.S. News and World Report graduate rankings. Faculty in the college have won 29 early career awards (NSF, DOE, DARPA, AFOSR, and ARO) since 2016. In FY24, the college had annual research expenditures of $113.6M.

The ISE Department offers BS, MS, and Ph.D. degrees in Industrial Engineering and MS and Doctor of Engineering degrees in Engineering Management. The Department currently has 13 tenured or tenure-track faculty members and an enrollment of more than 560 students, including 268 UG, 172 MS, and 121 Doctoral students. The Department will increase its faculty size to 25 by 2026, including 16 tenured or tenure-track faculty members and nine full-time teaching or research faculty members. ISE actively interacts with on-campus centers, including the Institute for a Secure and Sustainable Environment, the Reliability and Maintainability Center, the Center for Transportation Research, the state’s Institute for Public Service, and so on. Departmental strengths include optimization, data analytics, machine learning, quantum computing, reliability and maintainability, and operational excellence, and their applications in manufacturing, logistics and transportation, supply chain, energy systems, sustainability, and healthcare systems. The annual externally funded research expenditure is more than $5.4M. The department was ranked 26th among all