Project Engineer at Camden, So. Cal office.

The University of San Francisco College of Arts and Sciences seeks candidates for an open faculty position in its new Engineering Program. Candidates of all ranks are invited to apply. We seek candidates from a broad range of engineering disciplines who are committed to excellence in engineering education. The successful candidate will be an important part of the faculty team developing the new program.

Overview of Engineering at USF

Upon his arrival at USF in 2014, President Fr. Paul Fitzgerald called for the development of a School of Engineering, with the goal of developing an innovative, forward-looking engineering school, grounded with an interdisciplinary undergraduate program and professionally-oriented graduate programs. Since then, we have been working to make this vision a reality and are in the midst of developing an engineering program that is nimble, responsive, and humane, and that develops engineers who are innovative, creative problem solvers with both strong technical skills and the vision, empathy, and humanistic perspective that come with a Jesuit liberal arts education. The San Francisco Bay Area provides a unique location to create such a program. We have been in extended dialogue with local industry and community leaders to be certain we are graduating students with the necessary skills.

We plan to begin by offering a single undergraduate degree in Engineering; currently, we are planning for concentrations in Electrical, Computer, Environmental, and Sustainable Built Environment Engineering. We are constructing a program that heavily emphasizes project-based learning and interdisciplinary team-based experiential education.

We plan to enroll the first class of baccalaureate students in the fall of 2020, with master’s program(s) to be rolled out shortly thereafter.

The academic home for this position is the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Position Description and Responsibilities: 

The Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering (BEE) at Cornell University seeks candidates for a tenure-track position aimed at developing a nationally recognized research and teaching program on complex systems engineering at the nexus of food, water, and energy. 

This position has a balanced effort between research (50%) and teaching (50%) on a 9-month academic year basis. The successful candidate will provide engineering leadership to interdisciplinary collaborative teams exploring food, water and/or energy systems and their environmental and economic sustainability. We are interested in candidates who have demonstrated expertise in investigating complex biological systems and can work with colleagues in our department and across the university in building an understanding of the tradeoffs and opportunities that may be present at the nexus. 

Research: The successful candidate will be responsible for developing a nationally recognized research program in one or more areas of engineering of complex systems such as, but not limited to:

• Developing quantitative, predictive and computational modeling of food-water-energy systems that increase our decision support capability for critical systems;
• Multi-disciplinary and multi-scale (with emphasis on a larger scale) representations of food-water-energy systems with safety and/or security in mind
• Using data, network and computing resources for autonomous reasoning and for synergizing robots and humans to improve efficiency, productivity, and sustainability;
• Real-time, high-resolution forecasting of plant development, yield and pests, energy/water expenditure, and agricultural sustainability using a mixture of structural models, AI, spatial statistics and machine learning; 
• Using data and mathematical models for analysis of the ecosystem services of interconnected food, water and/or energy systems in affecting human well-being;
• Exploiting new data streams to advance biological system adaptation, resilience, stress mitigation and pest resistance. 

This is one of six positions generated as part of the digital agriculture initiative in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell. This initiative offers exciting opportunities to link digital technologies agriculturally important disciplines. http://www.digitalagriculture.cornell.edu/ 

The successful candidate will be expected to secure extramural funding to support a research program from sources such as NSF, USDA, DOD, DOE and other related federal sponsors, New York State agricultural research funding sources, and commodity boards. The successful candidate will also be expected to collaborate effectively in transdisciplinary projects with faculty in other departments, including Cornell Cooperative Extension, as appropriate. In addition, departmental, college, and university committee service will be expected.