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NEWS RELEASE

University of Tennessee

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Office of Research, Innovation, and Economic Development has named Professor Vasileios Maroulas the new assistant vice chancellor and deputy director of the AI Tennessee Initiative.

Maroulas will work with the director of the AI Tennessee Initiative to advance research, education, innovation and economic development in artificial intelligence and related areas that benefit both UT’s students and the state of Tennessee.

“Vasileios has been an active leader in advancing transdisciplinary AI for many years,” said Lynne Parker, associate vice chancellor and director of the AI Tennessee Initiative. “His expertise in building bridges between theoretical and applied research aligns very well with our goal to make life and lives better through AI research and education.”

A professor in the Department of Mathematics, Maroulas will maintain his faculty position while serving in the new role. He also holds adjunct appointments in business analytics and statistics in UT’s Haslam College of Business and in data science and engineering in the Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education.

Maroulas’ research encompasses a diverse range of AI and data science methodologies including computational statistics, machine learning, applied probability and computational topology as well as geometry. These approaches are employed in data analysis and quantum computing and have proven valuable in diverse fields such as defense, chemistry, health, neuroscience, materials science and biology. Maroulas has secured funding for his work from numerous federal agencies such as the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation as well as from renowned national laboratories and private foundations like Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Leverhulme Trust. Industry partners including Eastman and Lockheed Martin have provided additional support for his work.

“I am thrilled at the prospect of contributing to UT’s mission, and the AI Tennessee Initiative particularly, where I look forward to fostering strategic partnerships and uncovering AI opportunities that will not only enhance our university and its mission in research and education but also enrich the lives of our students and positively impact the state of Tennessee,” said Maroulas.

Maroulas is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute; an editor-in-chief of the American Institute of Mathematical Sciences journal, Foundations of Data Science; a senior advisory editor of the Association for Computing Machinery’s journal, Probabilistic Machine Learning; and an editor of Springer Nature’s journal Statistics and Computing and of Scientific Reports. He served as a senior research fellow at the U.S. Army Research Lab and a Mathematical Sciences Leverhulme Trust Fellow at the University of Bath.

Maroulas received his doctoral degree in statistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008. He worked in the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota as a Lockheed Martin Postdoctoral Fellow before joining UT in 2010.