Faculty Position in Physical AI and Assured Autonomous Systems

Job Description The Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Virginia Tech invites applications for a tenure-track or tenured faculty position at the assistant or associate professor level in Physical AI and Assured Autonomous Systems. We seek candidates who develop foundational theory, algorithms, hardware-software systems, and experimental platforms that enable intelligent physical systems to perceive, learn, reason, communicate, decide, and act safely, securely, and reliably in complex, dynamic, and uncertain environments.

Of particular interest are candidates whose work advances assured autonomy by integrating artificial intelligence and machine learning with sensing, estimation, control, embedded and real-time computing, communications, and physical interaction. The position is based in Blacksburg, Virginia, with opportunities for collaboration across Virginia Tech's research institutes and the Institute of Advanced Computing in Alexandria, Virginia. The successful candidate will be expected to develop and sustain a nationally recognized, externally funded research program, teach undergraduate and graduate courses, mentor students, and contribute to department, college, and university service and outreach activities.

The ECE department offers B.S., M.Eng., M.S., and Ph.D. degree programs in both Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering with a current enrollment of approximately 1,350 undergraduate and 600 graduate students. The department has 71 full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty members and 22 non-tenure-track faculty located in two primary locations, which are the Blacksburg Campus and the Greater Washington, DC area including the new VT Institute of Advanced Computing Campus in Alexandria, Virginia.

Annual research expenditures exceed $64M. Recognition of faculty accomplishments includes 4 members of the National Academy of Engineering, 32 Fellows of the IEEE, and various fellows of other professional societies, 27 current and prior NSF CAREER awardees, 1 DARPA Young Faculty Award, and 4 DoD Young Investigators. The latest Global Universities ranking by U.S. News & World Report places our department at #5 nationally in the Electrical and Electronic Engineering category.

The department has some of the nation’s best programs in the areas of fiber optics and photonics, space science and remote sensing, wireless communications and networking, power electronics, power systems, autonomous systems, embedded systems, and computational biology. The Department is the beneficiary of the Bradley Endowment valued in excess of $20 million. For additional information about the department and the College of Engineering, please visit (Use the "Apply for this Job" box below).

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We seek outstanding candidates whose research will help establish Virginia Tech ECE as a leader in the convergence of artificial intelligence and engineered physical systems. Priority will be given to work that couples rigorous foundations with deployable, experimentally validated systems. The search is organized around three complementary research pillars: (1) Physical AI and embodied intelligence, including multimodal perception, world models, learning-enabled control, foundation-model-enabled autonomy, planning, and intelligent interaction with the physical world;

(2) assured autonomy, including safety, security, robustness, resilience, formal methods, verification and validation, test and evaluation, runtime assurance, trustworthy learning and control, and certifiable autonomous systems; and (3) networked and real-time autonomous systems, including multi-agent autonomy, cooperative robotics and swarms, communications-control co-design, edge and embedded AI, distributed sensing and…