Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering Department

Vanderbilt Biomedical Engineering seeks to recruit an Assistant Professor whose scholarship and translational program advance autonomous, sensor-rich, and decision-support-enabled treatment systems for trauma and procedural care in austere, contested, and remote-care environments. The target candidate will develop technologies that extend life-saving intervention capability when expert personnel, infrastructure, and evacuation are limited, conditions central to Large-Scale Combat Operations, Prolonged Casualty Care, and future lunar/exploration-class space missions.

Particular emphasis is placed on systems that assess, predict, and actively manage patient physiological status during injury, resuscitation, stabilization, and transport. These challenges are increasingly relevant to distributed national security scenarios and emerging space-health applications, where medical expertise, resources, communications, and evacuation capabilities may all be constrained.

The search will prioritize candidates working at the intersection of medical robotics, soft robotic and advanced actuation technologies for medical applications, autonomous therapeutic delivery systems, autonomy and human-machine teaming, intelligent physiological sensing and monitoring, computational physiology, AI-enabled guidance and decision support, adaptive treatment systems, and novel treatment modality end-effectors
, with clear pathways to prototypes, validation, and translation.

Representative focus areas could include: (1) autonomous or semi-autonomous robotic assistance for casualty stabilization and damage-control procedures; (2) soft robotic, compliant, and bioinspired systems for diagnostic, therapeutic, or interventional applications; (3) mixed and augmented reality for guidance, telepresence, and just-in-time training; (4) sensor fusion, physiological-state estimation, and predictive monitoring for adaptive treatment and resuscitation; (5) closed-loop therapeutic systems that autonomously adjust interventions based on real-time physiological feedback;

(6) automated treatments and therapeutic systems for austere, contested, remote, or spaceflight conditions; (7) robust algorithms for operations under limited imaging, uncertain anatomy, physiologic instability, or degraded communications; and (8) deployable platforms engineered for size, weight, power, maintainability, and field reliability.

Particularly attractive candidates will develop technologies that advance either intelligent autonomous care systems, novel intervention and therapeutic delivery technologies, or the integration of both approaches
, enabling autonomous or semi-autonomous management of hemorrhage, shock, burn and traumatic injury, physiological instability, and other acute conditions encountered when expert clinical care is unavailable. Successful candidates will view the patient as an integral component of the engineered system and develop approaches that explicitly incorporate physiological response, treatment efficacy, and patient-specific adaptation into the design of autonomous and semi-autonomous care technologies.