The Future of California Starts Here

SJSU’s Strategic Plan, ​Transformation 2030​, calls upon the campus to “gain a national and global reputation for academic excellence characterized by scholarly and professional contributions from faculty members who are genuine teacher-scholars.” To make this possible, we have developed five broad hiring themes that enable us to say, “The Future of California starts here.”

The following themes were developed from the hiring requests made by the departments during the three-year hiring planning process. These themes focus on core campus strengths while meeting critical need areas in particular disciplines, and are cross-cut by our commitment to recruiting and retaining highly diverse tenure-track faculty. 

• Data Analytics and Design Thinking: We live in a world of “big” and “little” data, where terabytes of information are flowing faster across space and time than ever before. This broad theme seeks to attract faculty with an interest in data analytics and design thinking, meaning the development of innovations that are focused on the context in which a challenge may arise, examining questions around ethics, privacy, and accessibility, amongst other critical social issues.
  
  
• Ethnic Studies Education: More than an “accounting” of histories that are “outside the historical canon,” Ethnic Studies education creates a challenge to the historical framings of how teaching and learning should work. Working up from cultural experiences to frame new social understandings of how students learn and how we teach is an essential part of what SJSU should do and wants to do toward the future.
  
  
• Health Equity and Health Infrastructures: Despite the rapid evolution of pharmaceutical sciences, surgery systems, alternative therapies, and integrative medicine, there remain massive gaps in health outcomes across communities small and large. This broad theme seeks to recruit faculty with a commitment to addressing the health outcomes gap through strategies to enhance public health and social welfare systems, working in health science, the physical and life sciences and engineering as well as the social sciences, education, and humanities.
  
  
• Social Robotics and Human-Robotic Technology Relations: From the emergence of natural language processing to assistive robots in recuperative therapy and mental health research, robotic technologies are ubiquitous in our everyday lives. From hardware to software and from ethics to politics, we seek faculty trained in the “work of robots” and whose work explores how such advances impact the widening gap between those who have access to such technologies and those who do not.
  
  
• Sustainable Futures and Earth Systems Science: Some would argue we have entered the Anthropocene, a period of time where human-induced change to the environment has outstripped the processes that have changed Earth over millions of years. The science of sustainability and Earth Systems helps us understand the human ability to mitigate that change and adapt to new resilient systems that will allow us to sustain this planet. Scholars in this area engage in interdisciplinary conversations that ask not only what the science tells us about climate change, but how that science is received and interpreted.

We look forward to welcoming new faculty in the coming years whose work connects to these critical themes that showcase how SJSU is developing a national and global reputation for research excellence.