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AI Faculty Cluster Hire

Building faculty capacity to advance research, scholarship, and education in an age of AI

Over the next three years, WashU will recruit more than 30 faculty as part of a university-wide investment in the future of AI research and education. Led by the Office of the Provost in partnership with the deans of six participating schools, the initiative will advance four strategic areas that represent WashU’s strongest opportunities to shape the future of AI across science, society, and creative practice. 

These hires will bring together scholars with deep expertise in their fields to advance AI methods and pursue shared questions with colleagues across disciplines.

In Arts & Sciences, we welcome proposals from any A&S department for a faculty search that aligns with one or more of the thematic areas listed below. As always, we especially welcome joint hiring proposals.

The initiative supports hiring across four thematic areas:

  1. Agentic AI: AI Governance, Society, and Institutions — modeling multi-agent systems and the institutional structures needed to oversee them.
  2. Human Values, Creative Practice, and AI — scholarship and creative practice exploring what it means to be human amid generative AI.
  3. AI-Driven Imaging Science: Imaging from Molecules to the Universe — foundation models, generative modeling, and inverse problem methods applied across scales.
  4. AI for Science and Engineering: Modeling the Physical World — AI and computational methods for modeling, simulating, and reasoning about physical systems.

As a part of this initiative, Arts & Sciences is also sponsoring a special Rules of Life-anchored search already underway that includes chemistry, physics, biology, statistics & data science, psychological and brain sciences, and philosophy. 

The Four Thematic Areas

Agentic AI: Governance, Society, and Institutions

The most consequential questions about AI in the years ahead will ask how agentic systems behave at scale (in markets, institutions, and democratic life) and how society governs them.

This cluster will recruit scholars whose research addresses the technical modeling of multi-agent systems and the legal, regulatory, and institutional structures needed to oversee them. We are particularly interested in work engaging high-stakes contexts where WashU has existing strength, including population health, democratic institutions, and biotechnology.

Human Values, Creative Practice, and AI

Generative AI raises fundamental questions about what it means to be human in a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, including how we understand authorship, craft, ethics, production and aesthetic judgment.

This area will bring together scholars who critically examine these questions through a humanistic lens as well as creative practitioners, including artists, designers, architects, filmmakers and writers, whose studio-based work engages with and helps shape the next generation of creative tools.

AI-Driven Imaging Science: Imaging from Molecules to the Universe

WashU’s strength in biomedical imaging, supported by a world-class academic medical center, positions the university to lead the next generation of AI-driven imaging science across disciplines.

This cluster recruits scholars advancing foundation models, generative modeling and inverse-problem methods, and applying them across fields including biomedical sensing, biodiversity and environmental monitoring, the built environment, population health and food security.

AI for Science and Engineering: Modeling the Physical World

The physical sciences and engineering are being transformed by AI methods that can model, simulate and reason about physical systems at scales previously out of reach.

This cluster recruits scholars whose work combines advances in AI and computational methods with deep knowledge of the scientific and engineering domains in which they are applied. That work may span areas such as climate science, materials and digital twins, as well as AI-accelerated discovery in fields such as structural biology, astrophysics and quantum systems. We are especially interested in scholars using AI to connect information across temporal and spatial scales.

Proposal Instructions

To submit a proposal, departments should fill out the +AI Hiring Proposal Form and submit it to Abdul Ursani by October 15, 2026. Proposal review will begin on October 2, so early submissions are welcome. Submissions will be reviewed by the Dean's Advisory Council, and departments receiving a positive endorsement will be forwarded to the provost-level review process for consideration.