OPENINGS

openings

Seeking Applicants For Tenure-Track/Tenured Faculty Positions Across All Areas Of Civil And/Or Systems Engineering

The Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Civil Engineering (currently transitioning to the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering) seeks applicants for tenure-track/tenured faculty positions at all levels and across all areas of Civil and/or Systems Engineering. While there is an emphasis on research that impacts any of our growing research thrusts in resilient cities, safety and security, space exploration and habitation, future energy infrastructure and/or decision-making for health, all qualified applicants in any area of Civil and Systems Engineering will be considered.

The Department currently has 12 faculty whose research broadly covers the areas of Structures, Systems, and Mechanics of Materials. Current enrollments in the Department are approximately 21 undergraduate students, 21 masters students, and 51 doctoral graduate students. The department maintains laboratories and major facilities for research. Strong links to JHU institutes and centers such as the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare, the Center for Systems Science and Engineering, the Center for Integrated Structures-Materials Modeling and Simulation, the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute, the Johns Hopkins Center for Additive Manufacturing and Architected Materials, and the Cold-formed Steel Research Consortium expand the footprint of the Department both within and outside of the University. More information about the Department can be found at http://www.ce.jhu.edu.

The Whiting School of Engineering comprises over 200 full time tenure-track, research, and teaching-track faculty in nine academic programs with a total annual research budget of over $170 million. Research partnerships with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Applied Physics Laboratory, Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences make the Whiting School of Engineering a unique research and educational environment. Student enrollment exceeds 1800 at the undergraduate level with over 1000 full time MS and PhD students. The Engineering for Professionals program enrolls over 4000 part time continuing education students and is the largest program of its kind in the country.

Applicants must hold an earned doctorate in an appropriate field by the time their appointment begins. Candidates must have a demonstrated record of outstanding independent research and excellence in teaching, professional service and translation. Applications at all levels will be considered; salary and rank will be commensurate with qualifications and experience. Applicants should submit a curriculum vitae, a research statement, a teaching statement, and three recent publications.  Applications must be made on-line at https://apply.interfolio.com/70230.

Candidates applying for Associate or full Professor positions should not provide any information for references. Candidates applying for the position of Assistant Professor should provide names and contact information of at least three (3) references. Review of applications will begin immediately.  While candidates who complete their applications by December 1, 2019 will receive full consideration, the Department will consider exceptional applicants at any time.

The Johns Hopkins University is committed to active recruitment of a diverse faculty and student body. The University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer of women, minorities, protected veterans and individuals with disabilities and encourages applications from these and other protected group members. Consistent with the University’s goals of achieving excellence in all areas, we will assess the comprehensive qualifications of each applicant.

The Whiting School of Engineering and the Department of Civil Engineering are committed to building a diverse educational environment.

Back to openings

Many outpatient facilities with expensive resources, such as infusion and imaging centers, experience surge in their patient arrival at times and are under-utilization at other times. This pattern results in patient safety concerns, patient and staff dissatisfaction, and limitation in growth, among others. Scheduling practices is found to be one of the main contributors to this problem.

We developed a real-time scheduling framework to address the problem, specifically for infusion clinics. The algorithm assumes no knowledge of future appointments and does not change past appointments. Operational constraints are taken into account, and the algorithm can offer multiple choices to patients.

We generalize this framework to a new scheduling model and analyze its performance through competitive ratio. The resource utilization of the real-time algorithm is compared with an optimal algorithm, which knows the entire future. It can be proved that the competitive ratio of the scheduling algorithm is between 3/2 and 5/3 of an optimal algorithm.

This work was performed with the MIT/MGH Collaboration.

In many healthcare services, care is provided continuously, however, the care providers, e.g., doctors and nurses, work in shifts that are discrete. Hence, hand-offs between care providers is inevitable. Hand-offs are generally thought to effect patient care, although it is often hard to quantify the effects due to reverse causal effects between patients’ duration of stay and the number of hand-off events. We use a natural randomized control experiment, induced by physicians’ schedules, in teaching general medicine teams. We employ statistical tools to show that between the two randomly assigned groups of patients, a subset who experiences hand-off experience a different length of stay compared to the other group.

This work was performed with the MIT/MGH Collaboration.

Primary care is an important piece in the healthcare system that affects the downstream medical care of patients heavily. There are specific challenges in primary care as healthcare shifts from fee-for-service to population health management and medical home, focuses on cost savings and integrates quality measures. We consider the primary care unit at a large academic center that is facing similar challenges. In this work we focus on the imbalance in workload, which is a growing regulatory burden and directly concerns any staff in primary care. It can result in missed opportunities to deliver better patient care or providing a good work-environment for the physicians and the staff. We consider the primary care unit at the large academic center and focus on their challenge in balancing staff time with quality of care through a redesign of their system. We employ optimization models to reschedule providers’ sessions to improve the patient flow, and through that, a more balanced work-level for the support staff. 

This work was performed with the MIT/MGH Collaboration.

Perioperative services are one of the vital components of hospitals and any disruption in their operations can leave a downstream effect in the rest of the hospital. A large body of evidence links inefficiencies in perioperative throughput with adverse clinical outcomes. A regular delay in the operating room (OR), may lead to overcrowding in post-surgical units, and consequently, more overnight patients in the hospital. Conversely, an underutilization of OR is not only a waste of an expensive and high-demand resource, but it also means that other services who have a demand are not able to utilize OR. This mismatch in demand and utilization may, in turn, lead to hold-ups in the OR and cause further downstream utilization. We investigate the utilization of operating rooms by each service. The null hypothesis of this work is that the predicted utilization of the OR, i.e., the current block schedule, matches completely with the actual utilization of the service. We test this hypothesis for different utilization definitions, including physical and operational utilization and reject the null hypothesis. We further analyze why a mismatch may exist and how to optimize the schedule to improve patient flow in the hospital.