Precision Health and Environment
Transforming data’s role in promoting equitable 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 diverse 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 Cherokee 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
New Positions
POSTED: Apply Here
Assistant Professor
School of Information Sciences
Focus: Health information
POSTED: Apply Here
Assistant Professor
Department of Mathematics
Focus: Deep learning mathematics
POSTED: Apply Here
Assistant Professor
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Focus: Environmental health engineering
POSTED: Apply Here
Assistant, Associate, or Full Professor
College of Nursing
Focus: Nurse informaticist
FILLED
Robert Davis
UT–Oak Ridge National Laboratory Governor’s Chair for Biomedical Informatics
UT Medical Center
Focus: Bioinformatics and epidemiology
PLANNED
Associate Professor
Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Focus: Natural language processing
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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Assistant Professor, Nursing
machine learning, hybrid models-based, systems engineering, digital twin design for high consequence environments, decision support systems
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Professor, Ecology & Environmental Biology & Director, National Institute for Modeling Biological Systems
evolution, ecology, and sociobiology of infectious disease epidemiology; mathematical modeling; one health; economic and behavioral epidemiology; biosecurity
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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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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, 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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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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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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Assistant Professor, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
computational imaging, biometric recognition systems, multi-modal content understanding, AI-driven precision medicine, explainability
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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