About Our Leadership

A Message from Dean Scott Poole

At the University of Tennessee, we strive to be at the forefront of changes that will enable the best and brightest students to pursue entrepreneurial initiatives, lead creative teams and accelerate innovation. To do that, we are intensifying our efforts to bring new energy, strength and purpose to our curriculum. In the past few years, we have added more than 20 faculty and staff members to an already strong cohort.

To elevate our teaching and learning capabilities, we recently installed more than $2.5 million in new equipment and infrastructure upgrades to our facilities, including 400 state-of-the-art student workstations in the Art + Architecture Building, and the acquisition of a 20,000-square-foot fabrication laboratory–our Fab Lab, which includes an innovation hub of advanced technology and design studio in a superbly renovated building in the heart of downtown Knoxville.

We are particularly fortunate to be embedded in Knoxville, an emerging American city at a moment of intense revitalization. Through our Governor’s Chair for Energy + Urbanism––a five-year collaboration of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the UT College of Architecture and Design––we use our combined intellectual capital, design expertise and scientific capacity to conduct forward-looking experiments that focus on the vast, complex and urgent issues that face our cities and natural environment. We are examining water, urbanization, additive manufacturing and more. Our goals are ambitious. Through this unprecedented collaboration, we are identifying territories of opportunities for collaborative research that extend from Knoxville to the world.

The demands of practice are changing at an unprecedented pace, so it is crucial to have an educational environment that supports innovative learning and develops intellectual agility. Our college is keenly aware that we are preparing students for a workplace that will be unlike the past. To meet the challenges of the future––to be ready for the world–-our students work with cutting-edge design and fabrication technologies, engage with faculty members and visitors with specialized expertise and participate in study abroad programs centered in such locales as Italy, Poland, Germany and Finland.

To enrich the learning experiences of our students we engage research partners across the university––from engineering and agriculture to biology and business. We challenge ourselves to think about design from the scale of molecules to manufacturing. And to reinforce the idea that design is a competitive advantage, we aspire to create value for everyone involved with our community.

Scott Poole, FAIA, Dean