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. 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. To this end, the Vice President will build and lead the Office of Industry Alliances, including recruiting and managing relationship managers, data and research analysts, and communications and events staff, each with a designated functional lead reporting to the Vice President, with dotted-line coordination with school-based liaisons. The role is scoped deliberately alongside two closely related offices, so that responsibility for the region’s most important relationships is clear rather than duplicated. The Chief Partnerships Officer, within University Advancement, leads philanthropic solicitation, principal and major gifts, and executive relationship cultivation in service of fundraising; the Vice President engages the Chief Partnerships Officer whenever a relationship’s fundraising dimension moves to the center of the conversation. The Assistant Vice President for Innovation and Commercialization, within the Office of Research and Innovation, leads technology transfer, intellectual property licensing, and venture development; the Vice President refers relationships with a licensing or commercialization dimension to that office and coordinates with it on the entrepreneurial pipeline the Foundry and the Convergence Accelerator will bring into being. Within that scope, the Vice President owns the University’s strategic industry-partnership portfolio. The Vice President will also be an active supporter of the University’s two flagship regional presence initiatives named in Roadmap 2030, particularly the Sherman Education Center in the semiconductor corridor, and, as appropriate, the Health Innovations Campus in the Dallas Medical District, working alongside the schools and units that lead those efforts.
