Dean - Engineering
Hiring Department
The University of Texas Permian Basin (UTPB) seeks applications and nominations for a visionary and strategic leader as Dean of the College of Engineering and Sciences with a proven commitment to academic excellence and shared decision-making. The Dean fosters excellence in teaching, research, and service. Expected start will be Spring or Summer 2025.
Salary Range
Salary and compensation package is highly competitive based on candidate qualifications
Position
Reporting to the Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs (Provost) and serving as the College's Chief Academic Officer, the Dean will play a central role in enhancing academic excellence and aligning priorities with the strategic plans for Academic Affairs and the University. The Dean serves as a member of the Provost's senior leadership team and will work directly with the Provost, other University leaders, faculty, and staff in formulating the College's academic goals and policies. The Dean is a role model of integrity and professionalism for the College's faculty and is accessible to undergraduate and graduate students. In addition, the Dean is responsible for the articulation of the College's vision in alignment with the University mission on academic distinction; the development and administration of academic programs; scholarship, research, and service initiatives among faculty; college policies relating to instruction, curriculum, student success, research and other high impact practices; and faculty and academic staff appointments and performance assessments.
The Dean supervises activities within the College's program areas, including Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Petroleum Engineering, Chemistry, Geoscience, Computer Science, Mathematics, and Physics, including four master's programs, as well as several research centers and other units that support the academic mission of the College.
Working collaboratively with all stakeholders, the Dean supports excellence in teaching, research, creativity, and service while fostering activities that improve student retention, achievement, and timely graduation. Additionally, the Dean works with external sponsors, funding agencies, industry, and community leaders to develop research and educational partnerships that contribute to the region's economic vitality.
The Permian Basin and West Texas - an Unprecedented Opportunity
The Permian Basin is one of the country's fastest-growing, culturally vibrant, economically invigorated regions-full of industry, culture, and wide-open spaces. Spanning an area of 75,000 square miles, the low-lying geological formation of the Permian Basin is a stunning stretch of land with unique beauty that's home to the big, beautiful Texas skies. It's also home to the world's largest petroleum 'eld.
Accounting for more than 30% of the domestic oil production and recently named the largest oil reserve on the planet, the Permian Basin region of West Texas is poised to boost local and global economies for decades. As the U.S. is set to surpass Saudi Arabia as the world's largest oil producer, much of the growth in domestic oil production will come straight from the Permian Basin. The International Energy Agency expects global oil demand to grow until around 2040, which experts predict will support the creation of approximately 45,000 jobs across the Permian Basin through 2030.
However, it's not only oil fueling the region's substantial energy boom; wind and solar developments are diversifying the Permian Basin, putting it on the map as a critical energy provider for the future. West Texas is seeing an explosion in economic activity as other industries such as 'nance, construction, healthcare, digital technology, transportation, real estate, and public sector jobs grow alongside it. As the only major university in the Permian Basin, UTPB is positioned as its academic center, providing leadership and skilled professionals across the region's prominent and growing industries.
One example led by the College of Engineering and Sciences is a new and innovative Sustainable Energy strategic growth initiative. In support of this initiative, the Dean will lead efforts to hire nationally recognized faculty, combined with existing faculty, and will promote UTPB as a national leader in energy-related areas. Under the leadership of the Dean, the college will lead additional faculty searches over the next few years. The result will be a robust group that will provide broad capacity for developing innovative academic programs and conducting much-needed research in the area of sustainable energy sources, such as renewable energy and chemical production; electrochemical systems for energy storage and energy conversion; solar thermal systems; environmental sciences, geosciences, catalytic processes and materials for sustainable applications; and data analytics and computer simulations to discover methods that lead to progress in these and other areas of sustainable energy.
The engineering building is located on UTPB's Midland campus, where an exciting expansion of the University will take place in partnership with the Permian Strategic Partnership (https://permianpartnership.org/), the city of Midland, and healthcare professionals in the region. This new development will include hike and bike trails, green spaces, housing, mixed-use development, a new outdoor amphitheater, and future academic expansion for engineering, health sciences, and business development.
The College
The College of Engineering was formed six years ago from a department within the College of Business and Engineering. It has long-established accredited degree programs in Mechanical Engineering and Petroleum Engineering and has initiated three new degree programs in recent years: B.S. in Electrical Engineering, B.S. in Chemical Engineering, and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering. Civil Engineering is the latest program, which will begin in Fall 2025. Notably, the College is also home to the Texas Water and Energy Institute and a new Advanced Manufacturing Center established fall 2023. The College is housed in a building that opened in 2019, with excellent facilities for instructional and curricular activities and research and development. A second adjacent building received a complete renovation in 2023 and houses a state-of-the-art Innovation and Commercialization Center, Advanced Manufacturing Center, and additional support services.
In addition, the University recently completed an academic program reorganization process. We will add several science programs to the College over the next academic year, including Chemistry, Computer Science, Mathematics, Geosciences, and Physics.
Engineering and Sciences Facilities
The primary Engineering Building officially opened its doors in the fall of 2019. The $55 million state-of-the-art three-story building covers 105,801 square feet. The facility hosts 13 labs to support research initiatives in water and energy, artificial intelligence, and CO2 enhanced oil recovery. Each floor of the Engineering building includes Student Success Centers, private study rooms, conference rooms, faculty offices, and collaboration spaces. The first floor is home to the beautiful Henry Auditorium, a 100-seat lecture hall.
The other science departments are located on our main campus among two different buildings, the Science and Technology Building and the Founders Building. A 70,000 square-foot Science and Technology Building houses Chemistry, Biology, Physics, Math, and Computer Science departments. In addition to faculty offices and lecture halls, the building contains teaching laboratories, research laboratories, and several computer labs. 2,876 sq. feet of space is dedicated to research laboratories, and 3,364 sq. feet is dedicated to teaching laboratories with 24 fume hoods. The University also has other program-specific teaching and research facilities.
The Palynology and Sedimentary Organic Matter Research Laboratory, Department of Geosciences. This lab was first established in early 2017 but has been recently relocated and fully renovated with the addition of state-of-the-art equipment, including:
1. Two new HF-resistant fume hoods for organic matter and fossil palynomorphs extraction from sedimentary rocks,
2. A fully automated Leica microscope and imaging system for examining, identifying, and documenting organic-walled microfossils. This system has the best objectives and optics Leica offers and allows for sample examination in transmitted white light using differential interference contrast, phase contrast, bright field, and dark field. The system is fully automated and controlled through a companion software that is capable of generating tile-scans of complete slides, extended depth of focus images (Z-Stacking), and morphological heat maps, among many others,
3. A Leica fluorescence microscope and imaging system fitted with a spectrophotometer for organic petrography and vitrinite reflectance measurement. This system also has the best Leica objectives and optics, allowing for sample examination using transmitted and reflected polarized light. The companion software enables full spectral analysis of studied specimens, providing crucial information about the type of organic content in a hydrocarbon source rocks along with its thermal maturation state,
4. A Thermo Scientific FlashSmart CHNS/O Elemental Analyzer equipped with a dual furnace base unit and a 32-position autosampler for evaluating important hydrocarbon sourcerock parameters (e.g., TOC), oil sourness, soil contaminants for environmental remediation studies, among others,
5. Sampling and coring equipment, as well as a digital semi-automatic rock grinding and polishing machine,
6. A high-resolution 3D printer (Ultimaker) that can print ceramic and metal forms.
The Geophysics Research Laboratory, Department of Geosciences. This lab is equipped with essential field instruments, including an L&R Gravity meter - suitable for microgal resolution microgravity surveys, for near-surface research, Trimble Geo 7 Series Premium cm-scale GPS- for locating survey points within 5cm of horizontal and vertical location, Resistivity meter SYSCAL R1 PLUS (200W, 2500mA, 600V) for medium depth exploration in groundwater and environmental projects. The lab also has 20 high-power workstations (HP CTO Z640) with 32 GB RAM 16-core processors with dual monitors. UTPB has received several commercial geoscience software packages, including Petrel, Paleoscan, Techlog, Petra, Kingdom Suite, RokDoc, Hampson Russell, Powerlog, and Geographix. The lab has a dedicated server (HP Dl380 Gen 9 E5-2640) to run the software licenses; the server also has a network storage space of 3.6 TB. This research lab allows students to perform research using:
1. Attribute-assisted 3D Seismic data interpretation,
2. Seismic-assisted quantitative reservoir characterization,
3. Well log interpretation in the areas of clean energy, fossil fuel, and CO2 sequestration.
The Hydrology and Geospatial Research Laboratories, Department of Geosciences. Research in the hydrology lab involves water quality evaluation, contamination rates, and groundwater remediation. The lab is equipped with one fume hood for hydrological processing of column experiment, shaker table, pH/Eh/total dissolved solids (TDS)/dissolved oxygen (DO) meters, water sample, groundwater flow regulator, and soil moisture recorder. The Geospatial lab has six high performance computer workstations used for data collection, image processing, and spatial analysis of GIS and remote sensing data. Software packages are available for geo-referencing, image processing, 3D visualization, satellite data collection, and spatial-temporal analyses over regional and national scales. The lab also has high-accuracy GPS, a wide format plotter, and Printer/Scanner/Copier.
The Bioinorganic Chemistry Research Laboratory, Department of Chemistry. This lab includes:
a. Four fume hoods for experiments with hazardous materials,
b. Heratherm Mechanical Convection Oven for multiple applications such as hydrothermal synthesis and drying agents/glassware,
c. Glove box for handling super oxygen/moisture sensitive chemicals/experiments,
d. Schlenk line, in combination with Welch dual-seal pump useful for manipulating moisture- and air-sensitive compounds,
e. Shimadzu RF6000 fluorescence spectrometer for thermodynamic data collection of enzyme and inhibitor interaction,
f. HP 8453 UV-Visible Diode Array Spectrophotometer for collecting kinetic data of enzyme inhibited by inhibitors (departmental),
g. Thermo Scientific Sorvall Legend Micro21 centrifuge for protein separations,
h. Gaussian software for geometry optimization, frequency calculation, and binding energy between enzymes and inhibitors,
i. pH meter for determining pH of buffer solution.
Adjacent to the Engineering Building is the Center for Energy and Economic Diversification (CEED) building. The 30,000 square foot building has recently received substantial renovations to develop spaces to support innovation and entrepreneurship. The CEED contains office space, co-working space, wet lab space, a makerspace, conference/event space, and a cafe, all of which are available for the community to use. The Office of Innovation and Commercialization is also co-located at the CEED along with the UTPB Small Business Development Center and two Engineering research labs, the Texas Water and Energy Institute, and the Advanced Manufacturing Center.
Students love learning in the world's energy epicenter and gain real-life experience through modern, advanced facilities.
Additional information can be found on the Engineering's web page and science's web page https://www.utpb.edu/academics/colleges/arts-sciences/ (currently it is our College of Arts and Sciences)
Essential Functions
The Dean strategically leads and manages all aspects of the College of Engineering and Sciences, providing collaborative leadership in developing high-quality engineering, science, and related STEM academic programs and research. The Dean will work with faculty and University leadership to develop strategic directions for the College, including a phenomenal opportunity to implement the academic reorganization by forming the College of Engineering and Sciences. In addition to strong administrative experiences, the selected candidate will have proven success in leading faculty in developing strong teaching, research, accreditation, and community/industry outreach efforts.
Collaborate with faculty and University leadership in the following areas:
Collaborate with faculty and University leadership in the following areas:
Creating/designing engineering/science curricula for next-generation engineering and science with relevance to regional and state needs
Developing and executing strategies for strong student recruitment, retention, and graduation rates
Promoting innovative and effective teaching in the College and providing appropriate supervision to the program coordinators, chairs and other faculty colleagues.
Promoting faculty and student scholarly activities to enhance research productivity and extramural funding in the College
Providing regular mentorship for our faculty or direct reports to meet their professional goals while achieving UTPB expectations
Managing processes required for successful ABET accreditation and initial accreditation of Chemical and Electrical Engineering for Fall 2024 (work is already ongoing)
Providing effective management of fiscal policies and procedures
Making decisions in a clear, timely, and collegial manner in accordance with the principles of shared governance
Facilitating faculty professional development
Planning and coordinating program reviews to acquire and maintain ABET and other programmatic accreditation.
Collaborating regularly with the active 50-member Engineering Advisory Board external advisory board to nurture research and education partnerships, expand the impact of the College's work, and secure significant contributions of time, talent, and treasure
Creating a collaborative/collegial environment in the College and all other campus stakeholders
Working closely with the faculty to promote and develop interdisciplinary research and academic programs while managing advantageous disciplinary mergers across colleges
Providing oversight and insights for academic and extracurricular programs in STEM fields
Making recommendations on programs and services to promote STEM fields, especially engineering and sciences, to area schools and colleges
Creating and maintaining community, industry, and government partnerships that support College research and education programs
Fostering a climate focused on student success by providing a comprehensive array of student professional, career, and leadership development programs and support services
Other duties as assigned by the Provost
Required Qualifications
Terminal Degree in Engineering/Sciences, a related applied science, or equivalent field from a regionally accredited institution.
Five (5) years of administrative experience overseeing complex operations, documented industry experience and/or leadership roles, skill set in business development, and experience working with industry/government partners
Progressive academic and administrative or professional experience with significant accomplishments, including credentials that qualify for a faculty position at the rank of Professor or equivalent executive-level experience served in professional institutions.
Success in attracting, recruiting, retaining, and evaluating faculty consistent with the highest standards of scholarship.
Success in leading programs to ABET accreditation or others.
Success building and executing a strategic and fiscally sound unit budget.
Preferred Qualifications
Experience in building successful, productive administration-faculty relationships and shared decision-making
Demonstrated success in developing productive partnerships with community/industry.
Experience in developing/restructuring interdisciplinary research and academic programs.
Solid track record in meeting the Institution's mission concerning enrollment, graduation, research, and others.
Additional Information
Required Application Materials
1. Cover Letter
2. Resume or CV
3. List of References
4. Unofficial Transcripts
Conditions of Employment
1. The job description is not a complete list of all responsibilities and duties performed by employees. Employees may perform other related duties as assigned by their immediate supervisor.
2. Employment is subject to an introductory period to monitor employee performance.
3. Once hired, the prospective employee must present documentation within three (3) days of the hire date to establish their identity and employment eligibility as required by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Applicants must be able to show proof of eligibility to work in the United States by time of hire. UTPB participates in e-Verify.
4. Employees must be able and willing to travel and perform duties away from campus as necessary and must be able to operate a licensed motor vehicle, have access to a dependable motor vehicle, and possess a valid state driver's license. Must have and maintain a satisfactory driver's record.
5. Employment is contingent upon a successful background check.
6. UT Permian Basin is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran.
Schedule
Generally, the normal work hours for the university are Monday through Thursday, 7:30 - 5:30 pm; Friday, 8:00 am - 12:00 pm with a one-hour lunch. The individual holding this position may need to be available early morning, evening, and on weekends to meet the needs of the department. Hours worked may differ with some departments.
Standard Working Conditions
1. Able to lift various materials up to 25 pounds on an occasional basis.
2. Able to bend, crouch, and reach continuously.
3. Physically able remain seated, frequently to continuously.
4. Able to remain standing up to 15% of the time.
5. Possesses dexterity abilities required to perform job duties including extensive keyboard work, operating office equipment, performing filing, and other job-related responsibilities that include extensive wrist and hand movement.
6. Standard working conditions may differ depending on department and occupation
University Benefits
1. UT Permian Basin offers an excellent compensation package including heath, retirement, & fringe benefits for eligible employees.
2. Coverage includes medical, prescriptions, life insurance, AD&D, and matching retirement provided by UTPB.
3. You may also be eligible to add dental, vision, family coverage, & flex-spending accounts, additional retirement, and a few other coverages as options too.
4. Fringe benefits include tuition reimbursement (after one year of service), wellness breaks, employee assistant program (EAP), and meal deals, among other perks and discounts!
5. Our benefits package, along with an ample leave policy, make for a great total compensation package.
About the University
The University of Texas Permian Basin is located in Odessa, Texas. It was authorized by the Texas Legislature in 1969 and founded in 1973. The Permian Basin is one of the fastest-growing, culturally vibrant, economically invigorated regions of the country - full of industry, culture, and wide-open spaces. At the academic heart of this area sits The University of Texas Permian Basin - which every year, delivers smart, savvy leaders across the U.S.
As a regional, comprehensive institution, The University of Texas Permian Basin serves a diverse community of students from the region, the state, and beyond. Through excellence in student-centered teaching, learning, research, and public service, the University cultivates engaged citizens and impacts lives while advancing the technology and public interests of West Texas.
Our vision is that the University of Texas Permian Basin will be an innovative, responsive university that thinks large and lives local. We will lead in advancing education, research, economic competitiveness, and cultural enrichment.
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Thank you for your consideration in today's job market. We look forward to connecting with you more in the future.
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