Non-Tenure Track Faculty Position At Virginia Tech National Capital Region

The Department of Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech invites applications for a collegiate faculty in Design, Materials and Manufacturing at Assistant or Associate Professor level, starting August 2017, for its newly expanding graduate program in the National Capital Region (NCR) in suburban Washington DC area.  This is a non-tenure-track contract position.  Areas include computational solid mechanics, multi-scale modeling of materials, design methodology, design optimization, materials design, computer-aided design, and modeling and simulation of advanced manufacturing processes. [Job number TR0160177. Search committee chair: Prof. Mehdi Ahmadian (ahmadian@vt.edu)]

This position is part of a large cluster hire of faculty across university for VT’s newly developed Destination Areas. VT’s Destination Areas represent difficult problems of present and future national and global importance for which VT is investing resources to build and support world-class groups of faculty that transcend our disciplinary strengths.  These positions will serve the Destination Area in “Data Analytics and Decision Sciences.”  (http://provost.vt.edu/destination-areas/da-data.html).  Although candidates with expertise in all sub-themes of this Destination Area are encouraged to apply, we are particularly interested in candidates with expertise in Infrastructure Analytics: Data as it relates to and revolutionizes the way we interact with the natural and the built environment.

Virginia Tech is committed to diversity and seeks a broad spectrum of candidates including women, minorities, and people with disabilities. Virginia Tech is a recipient of the National Science Foundation ADVANCE Institutional Transformation Award to increase the participation of women in academic science and engineering careers (www.advance.vt.edu).

Applicants must hold a doctoral degree in engineering or a closely related discipline. We are seeking highly qualified candidates committed to a career in teaching and research.  The successful candidates will be responsible for mentoring primarily the graduate students at the NCR and some undergraduate students, teaching courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels in both regular classrooms and long-distance settings, and developing a research program, although the primary mission of this position is teaching.  Candidates should apply online at www.jobs.vt.edu to the appropriate posting number given above. Applicants should submit a cover letter, a curriculum vitae including a list of published journal articles and other scholarship activities, a brief statement on teaching preferences, a one-page research statement, and the names of five references that the search committee may contact. Review of applications for all positions will begin on February 15, 2017 and will continue until the position is filled.

The Department of Mechanical Engineering (http://www.me.vt.edu/), which includes a Nuclear Engineering Program, has 61 faculty, research expenditures of over $16M, and a current enrollment of 340 graduate students with 180 students at doctoral level, and over 1100 undergraduate students. The Department is ranked 13th and 16th out of all mechanical engineering departments in the nation in undergraduate and graduate education, respectively, by the 2017 U.S. News and World Report. The Department includes several research centers, and its faculty members are engaged in diverse multidisciplinary research activities. The mechanical engineering faculty also benefit from a number of university-wide institutes such as the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science (ICTAS), the Biocomplexity Institute, Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI), College level centers such as the Rolls-Royce and the Commonwealth of Virginia Center for Aerospace Propulsion Systems (CCAPS), the recently established Rolls-Royce University Technology Center (UTC) in advanced systems diagnostics, the Virginia Center for Autonomous Systems (VaCAS), and  state level industry-academic research centers such as the Commonwealth Center for Aerospace Propulsion Systems (CCAPS) and the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing (CCAM).

VT’s National Capital Region (NCR) operations is continually expanding in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and currently offers more than 45 graduate degree and certificate programs. Approximately 1,000 students are enrolled in master’s degree and 300 students in Ph.D. programs in the region.  The university's Northern Virginia Center (NVC) in Falls Church, and its buildings in Old Town Alexandria and Arlington, are all easily accessible by Metro. Many online courses are also available. The VT’s College of Engineering at NCR currently offers graduate degrees in computer science, and electrical and computer engineering, civil and environmental engineering, and industrial and systems engineering. The ME department has offered nuclear engineering graduate program but now is expanding its offerings at NCR, envisioning a rapidly growing graduate program.  With this new position, and our existing faculty at NCR, a total of five ME faculty will serve our NCR graduate program by next year, while also supported by the faculty from our main campus in Blacksburg, VA.