The Department of Food, Nutrition and Packaging Sciences (FNPS) is seeking a visionary researcher and teacher to become the globally recognized expert on healthcare packaging for containment and protection of products through sterilization, storage, shipment, use, and disposal. Clemson University has much of the infrastructure required to be successful in the design, development, testing, and optimization of packaging for medical devices, pharmaceutical products, and drug delivery systems.

Clemson University is an R1 Research institution, with comprehensive and state-of-the-art resources.

FNPS staffed laboratories include material analysis, cast and blown film production, extrusion blown molding, injection molding, semi-rigid plastic packaging conversion, thermoforming, lamination, and much more. Campus includes a fully equipped machine shop to customize tooling, a dynamics lab to test structures for transport, food and thermal processing laboratories with equipment such as a Texture Analyzer (TA/TX), CT3 Brookfield Texture Analyzer, and GC/MS, wet lab nutrition analysis labs, shelf-life analysis capabilities, food safety, sensory lab, and health experts. FNPS design and prototyping capabilities are second to none, helping translate new materials into market-ready concepts. Packaging analytical equipment includes DSC, TMA, TGA, Instron universal testing machine, coefficient of friction, contact angle, FTIR, melt indexer, haze meter, gloss meter, hot tack tester, heat sealers, impulse sealers, induction sealer, Elmendorf tear testing, dart drop testing, environmental impact software, and an extensive list of packaging industry relationships.

The successful candidate for this position will focus their time on biomedical packaging research, and on developing and teaching an undergraduate and a graduate course in the fundamentals and advances in biomedical packaging.

The successful candidate is expected to:

• Support the Health Innovation focus of the Clemson Forward Strategic Plan

• Position Clemson University as the ultimate research partner of the booming medical/biotechnology industry in South Carolina, the United States, and globally

• Develop and teach courses in health care packaging to educate a competitive and unique workforce prepared to support the industry and its future needs

• Obtain grants and industrial contracts with packaging manufactures and suppliers and strengthen collaborative grant applications focused on biomedical technology development (NIH, NSF, DoD, Foundations) as well as innovation opportunities (IP, licenses, start-ups)

• Partner on project and research grants with other departments such as:

o Biomedical engineering

o Material science and engineering o Industrial engineering (human factors)

o Chemistry o Physics (sterilization)

o Environmental and Earth Sciences (sustainability)

o Nursing (Clemson University - Prisma Health Partnership)

• Support the work of the food, nutrition, and packaging sciences and bioengineering education and research initiative

• Publish work in relevant peer-reviewed journals

• Supervise and graduate M.S. and Ph.D. students