Rank Academic

Position: Open-Rank Academic
Position Information

Classification Title Open Rank FLSA Faculty Rank Open Rank (Tenure Track) Contract Type Academic (9 mo.) Tenure Status Tenure Track or Tenured

Minimum Qualifications

Ph.D. in social work or cognate discipline (e.g. psychology, sociology, public health, neuroscience, economics).

Position Summary

The School of Social Work seeks tenure-track faculty at the assistant, associate, or full professor ranks for joint appointments with a newly established School of Medicine in Digital Behavioral Health. We welcome applications from strong candidates in two areas: (1) Digital Mental Health and (2) Digital Behavioral Health for Substance Use Disorder (SUD).

You will join an exceptionally talented and passionate group of scholars and staff, and there are opportunities to work in partnership with our Center for Human Trafficking Research & Outreach, Center for Social Justice, Human and Civil Rights, and the Institute for Nonprofit Organizations. Faculty also collaborate with the College of Pharmacy, College of Public Health, the new College of Nursing, College of Engineering, College of Family and Consumer Sciences, Mary Frances Early College of Education, School of Law, the Owens Institute for Behavioral Research, the Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and other units.

Digital Mental Health

We seek a scholar to lead an externally funded program of human-subjects research that advances digital mental health across the lifespan. The successful candidate will design, test, and scale evidence-based digital prevention and intervention tools and decision support-such as digital therapeutics, EHR-enabled measurement-based care, sensors and other digital biomarkers-augmented by AI methods including natural language processing, predictive modeling, risk stratification, and safe, transparent decision support.

Projects may include conversational agents for psychoeducation or triage, AI-assisted clinical documentation and workflow optimization, and digital phenotyping for early detection, all developed and evaluated with strong ethical, equity, and governance safeguards. Emphasis is on real-world implementation that improves access, quality, and equity. The joint appointment enables close collaboration with clinical data science in Medicine while sustaining a Social Work portfolio centered on community implementation, mental health equity, practice integration, and ethics.

Digital Behavioral Health for SUD

We seek a scholar focused on SUD and co-occurring conditions to lead an externally funded, AI-driven program that designs, validates, and implements digital prevention, treatment, and recovery supports. Core activities include developing mobile and web interventions powered by predictive modeling for risk stratification and relapse forecasting, recommender systems for just-in-time adaptive interventions, and EHR-linked decision support that enables measurement-based care and care-pathway optimization.

The faculty member will integrate multimodal clinical and patient-reported data through learning-health-system pipelines, conduct hybrid effectiveness-implementation trials and real-world evaluations, and deploy tools across primary care, emergency, oncology, and community settings. They will also co-design recovery platforms that connect peer services and harm-reduction resources and lead dissemination strategies that promote equitable adoption and sustained engagement, with explicit attention to safety, transparency, and governance of AI in behavioral health.

Faculty will pursue extramural funding to develop, evaluate, and scale digital behavioral health tools; teach undergraduate and graduate courses in digital mental health, SUD science, co-occurring conditions, implementation methods, and research ethics and equity in digital care; and develop new curricula and short courses that translate emerging evidence into practice-ready skills. They will mentor students and trainees across disciplines-including MSW, MPH, PhD, MD, nursing, informatics, and data science-with attention to mentoring and career development;

build and sustain partnerships with hospitals, FQHCs, health departments, community-based organizations, and peer-led recovery programs to co-design, pilot, and implement digital interventions; and lead dissemination and implementation activities aligned with agency priorities, producing practical toolkits, train-the-trainer materials, and evaluation dashboards.

Faculty are expected to engage in teaching, research, field liaison duties and/or academic advising, and service. They may teach across the educational continuum at our Athens, Gwinnett, and Online campuses. We expect successful candidates to share our commitment to enriching our institutional missions of teaching, research and service.

Additional Requirements

Candidates for the Assistant Professor rank must have a Ph.D. in social work or cognate discipline (e.g. psychology, sociology, public health, neuroscience, economics). Candidates for the…