Vice President for Industry Engagement

Under the dynamic leadership of President Prabhas V. Moghe, The University of Texas at Dallas (UT Dallas) — one of the nation’s fastest-rising research institutions — seeks a visionary Vice President for Industry Engagement. This is a pivotal opportunity for a bold leader to help shape the University’s future at a transformative juncture, marked by entrepreneurial ambition and boundless innovation.

UT Dallas is poised to embark on an exciting new chapter of accelerated growth, enabling it to deepen its roots within the community and redefine the very essence of a 21st-century public research university. UT Dallas traces its origins to the founders of Texas Instruments—Eugene McDermott, Erik Jonsson, and Cecil Green—who established the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest in 1961 to help meet the region’s need for advanced technical talent. The University’s forthcoming strategic plan, Roadmap 2030 – The Power of Convergence, will ask the University to reclaim that origin deliberately, becoming an Innovation Destination where talent, technology, and industry converge to produce consequences that neither a company nor a university could produce alone. Through the plan’s External Impact pillar, “UT Dallas will serve as a premier partner for industry and the public, aligning research, talent and innovation to drive shared prosperity and global impact.”

The Vice President for Industry Engagement is the University’s Cabinet-level commitment to that ambition: an inaugural, highly visible leadership appointment charged with making UT Dallas the region’s most trusted and capable industry partner. This is a foundational role, and a statement of institutional priority. Reporting directly to the President as a full member of the President’s Cabinet, the Vice President will build a centralized function, essentially from the ground up, that serves as UT Dallas’s strategic “front door” to industry: the connective tissue, called for explicitly in Roadmap 2030, that enables a consequential opportunity arriving from outside the university finds the people and capabilities it needs inside, and ensures the university carry what emerges back into the world with equal effectiveness. The Vice President will design and operationalize a coordinated, hybrid operating model that elevates and connects existing activity across the seven schools, research centers, and administrative units rather than replacing it.

The successful candidate will bring 15 or more years of progressively responsible experience in corporate or industry engagement, economic development, or a comparable external-facing leadership role, with demonstrated experience operating at an executive level within a research university or a comparable complex organization, and demonstrated success building, launching, or substantially growing a centralized relationship-management or partnership function. The Vice President will also need the ability to build trust and drive coordination across autonomous academic units without formal authority over them, strong executive presence, and an authentic enthusiasm for UT Dallas’s origin story, with the ability to translate that story into a compelling case for partners, faculty, and staff alike.

The University of Texas at Dallas has retained Isaacson, Miller, a national executive search firm, to assist in conducting this important search. Confidential inquiries, nominations, and applications may be directed to the search firm below.

Andy Lee is leading this search with Ibaad Nazeer and Madeline Fitzpatrick.