Precision Health and Environment
Transforming data’s role in promoting better health outcomes
Cluster Goals
Teasing out relationships between health outcomes and the myriad of factors is complex. Predicting outcomes and integrating data into individualized patient care strategies are even more challenging—and promising.
We believe convergent science will lead to breakthroughs in understanding the health and well-being of individuals, communities, and societies. The work of the Precision Health cluster at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, will focus on linkages between climate, social determinants of health, health history and resources, pollution, water quality, genomics, lifestyle, and mental health to describe and predict health outcomes. Leveraging machine learning and aggregated electronic health records, the cluster will develop nuanced pictures of those relationships in communities from the Mississippi River to the Appalachian Mountains. We’ll target Tennessee’s top health care problems—cardiac conditions, respiratory conditions, and cancers—along with vector-borne diseases, infectious diseases, and mental health conditions.
The cluster will apply these discoveries to enhance health by deepening our understanding of the intricate connections that shape health outcomes. Ultimately, our data-driven work will undergird tools for practitioners, public health leaders, and others.
An Environment for Collaboration
The cluster integrates expertise and innovation from many disciplines, including:
- Public health
- Nursing
- Environmental engineering
- Chemistry
- Microbial ecology
- Mathematics
- Artificial intelligence and machine learning
- Climatic and environmental modeling
- Health informatics
- Epidemiology
- Genomics
Ready to take the next step?
Why UT?
New hires will join more than two dozen rising and senior faculty members to build on UT’s strengths while creating something new: a model for effective collaboration in convergent research. We’re determined to realize the full possibilities of collaborative discovery, interdisciplinary curricula, and center-scale funding for precision health.
The cluster bridges key UT research priorities: human health and wellness, energy and environment, and artificial intelligence. In doing so, it addresses a suite of intertwined federal funding priorities. It also bridges knowledge, experience, and data from multiple UT colleges, the UT Institute of Agriculture (including the UT One Health Initiative), and UT Medical Center.
The cluster is organized into four working groups: environmental informatics, health data optimization, machine learning and modeling, and health outcomes integration. Each is built on a robust core of faculty expertise and domain-specific data and models. Cluster members will seek opportunities to collaborate with and leverage resources from the National Institute for Modeling Biological Systems (NIMBioS), the Center of Excellence in Livestock Diseases and Human Health, and the Genomics Center for the Advancement of Agriculture.
UT Medical Center and community partner River Valley Health Systems will provide a health care practice perspective to help us accelerate translation from discovery in the lab to real-world impact in the community.
Join Our Academic Community
Explore the links below to learn more about open positions. Contact the faculty lead if you don’t see an open position aligned with your skill set or if you’re a current UT faculty member who wants to get involved.
Hiring Colleges
- College of Arts and Sciences
- College of Communication and Information
- College of Nursing
- College of Veterinary Medicine
- Tickle College of Engineering
Cluster Positions
Full Professor
Focus: Bioinformatics and epidemiology
Hiring Units:
Assistant/Associate Professor
Focus: Natural language processing
Hiring Unit:
Filled
Robert Davis UT–Oak Ridge National Laboratory Governor’s Chair for Biomedical Informatics
Focus: Bioinformatics and epidemiology
Hiring Unit:
Filled
Fuhar Dixit Assistant Professor
Focus: Environmental health engineering
Hiring Unit:
Filled
Yingbo Ma Assistant Professor
Focus: Health information
Hiring Unit:
Filled
Farzana Nasrin Assistant Professor
Focus: Deep learning mathematics
Hiring Unit:
Meet Our Cluster Community
Faculty Leads
Tami Wyatt
Torchbearer Professor and Associate Dean of Research and Torchbearer Professor, College of Nursing; Co-Director, Health Information Technology and Simulation Lab
Phone: 865-974-6804
Email: twyatt@utk.edu
Chris Cox
Robert M. Condra Professor and Head, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Phone: 865-974-7700
Email: ccox9@utk.edu
Robert Davis
UT–ORNL Governor’s Chair for Biomedical Informatics; Director, Precision Health and Environment Cluster
Phone: 901-378-5249
Email: rdavis88@uthsc.edu
Faculty
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Associate Dean for Research, Director of the Research and Innovation Center, Chancellor’s Professor, & Board of Visitors Professor, Communication and Information
knowledge creation, data management, disinformation message effects, team science
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Associate Dean for Research & Graduate Studies, Veterinary Medicine
biomedical materials, medical devices, tissue regeneration, stem cells, biotherapies, bioactive particles, complex scaffolds
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Professor, Department of Surgery, UT Medical Center
cancer (emphasis on breast), patient outcomes, patient satisfaction, communication skills, artificial intelligence, machine learning, clinical trials, education, epidemiology, public health
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Assistant Professor, Nursing
machine learning, hybrid models-based, systems engineering, digital twin design for high consequence environments, decision support systems
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Medical Director and Chief of the Division of Rheumatology, UT Medical Center
systemic lupus erythematosus, mechanisms of autoimmunity, spondyloarthritis
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Radiation Oncologist, UT Cancer Institute
cancer care, AI prediction of poor patient outcomes, AI-informed interventions, radiopharmaceutical development
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Associate Professor, Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering
pharmacology, immunology
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Assistant Professor, Surgery, UT Medical Center
computer vision, machine learning, surgical data analytics, surgical robotics, augmented reality, ambient intelligence
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Assistant Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
environmental pollution, emerging and radioactive contaminants, environmental health, environmental justice, ecosystem services
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Assistant Professor, Biosystems Engineering & Soil Science
flooding, water quality trends, disaster dynamics, water resources modeling, geospatial analytics, data science
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Chancellor’s Professor, John D. Tickle Professor, and James G. Gibson Professor
climate change, air quality, and energy using environmental modeling and large-scale simulations
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Assistant Professor, College of Nursing, UTHSC
care coordination, transitional care; health services research, health policy, health disparities
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Professor & Associate Department Head, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
x-ray CT, SPECT/PET, neutron imaging, applied machine learning
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Professor, Civil & Environmental Engineering
human exposome, environmental health, environmental microbiology
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Professor, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
large data visualization, ultra scale visualization for time-varying and multivariate data, parallel remote and distributed visualization
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Associate Professor, Industrial & Systems Engineering
Markov decision processes, dynamic programming, predictive analytics, reinforcement learning, time series analysis, anomaly detection
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Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry
Atmospheric chemistry, cloud microphysics and aerosol-cloud interactions, biogenic and biomass burning aerosols, aerosol acidity and multiphase chemistry, environmental monitoring and sensor development
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Professor, Dan Doulet Faculty Fellow, Industrial and Systems Engineering
electronic health record & large language models, mobile health, healthcare systems engineering, cancer research, healthcare digital twin solutions
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Assistant Professor, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
computational modeling, advanced control and AI, integrated real-time robotics system
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Assistant Professor, Public Health & Epidemiology, Biomedical & Diagnostic Sciences
infectious disease epidemiology, food safety, zoonotic diseases, biosecurity, occupational health, one health, social and behavioral research
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Assistant Professor, Biomedical and Diagnostic Sciences
infectious disease epidemiology; data science in public and animal health, antimicrobial resistance (AMR), One Health surveillance; health systems modeling, biosecurity and zoonotic risk
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Associate Professor, College of Medicine, Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology
Women’s Health and Neonatology
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Professor, Mathematics; Assistant Vice Chancellor; Deputy Director of AI Tennessee Initiative
computational probability, statistics and machine learning with computational topology and geometry for addressing interdisciplinary problems in data science and engineering
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Assistant Professor, Department of Surgery, UTMC – Knoxville
clinical outcomes, biobanking, process improvements, prospective clinical trials
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Associate Professor, Department of Family Medicine, UT Graduate School of Medicine
quantum biology, DNA biophysics, artificial intelligence, complex adaptive systems
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Associate Professor, College of Communication and Information
health communication, patient-provider communication
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Professor & Assistant Dean for Research & Graduate Studies, Veterinary Medicine
health disparities, spatial epidemiology, geographic information systems, health geography, population health, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, antimicrobial resistance
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Associate Professor, Public Health
patterns of antimicrobial use/resistance in veterinary medicine
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Associate Vice Chancellor Emerita
distributed mobile robotics, human-robot interaction, distributed intelligence, sensor networks, machine learning, embedded systems, multi-agent systems
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Professor, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
developing accelerated applications for computational chemistry and biology using high performance reconfigurable computing platforms
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Senior Methodologist and Associate Professor, CEHHS/Public Health
optimization research methods, mHealth/Wearables, behavioral medicine, chronic disease prevention
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Associate Dean of Research & Professor, Nutrition
obesity treatment, behavioral interventions, dietary intake, randomized trials, implementation science
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Assistant Professor, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
computational imaging, biometric recognition systems, multi-modal content understanding, AI-driven precision medicine, explainability
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Research Assistant Professor, College of Nursing
human microbiome, genomics, bioinformatics, chronic diseases, machine learning, multiomics
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Associate Professor, Mathematics
epidemiology, organismal ecology, substance use disorder population dynamics, complex systems, mechanistic modeling, simulation, mathematical biology
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Professor, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
security and privacy in wired/wireless networks and critical application systems
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Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
machine learning, cybersecurity, privacy, federated learning, generative models
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Research Assistant Professor, College of Nursing
pediatric end-of-life care, healthcare policies, social determinants of health, machine learning, geo-spatial analytics, rural health disparities
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Dean & Professor, College of Graduate Health Sciences, UTHSC
Graduate student and postdoctoral research training
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Assistant Professor, Department of Public Health, College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences
cardiovascular disease, rural health
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Dan Doulet Early Career Assistant Professor, Industrial & Systems Engineering
developing innovative physical-statistical models for decision optimization in complex systems