Assistant Professor - Physics and Astronomy

About the University

Western Washington University, with over 15,000 students in seven colleges and the graduate school, is nationally recognized for its educational programs, students and faculty. The campus is located in Bellingham, Washington, a coastal community of 90,000 overlooking Bellingham Bay, the San Juan Islands and the North Cascades Mountain range. The city lies 90 miles north of Seattle and 60 miles south of Vancouver, British Columbia.

Western has additional sites in Anacortes, Bremerton, Everett, Port Angeles, and Poulsbo. Western is recognized nationally for its successes, such as being named one of the top public master’s-granting institutions in the Pacific Northwest for 25 years in a row by U.S. News & World Report.

Western Washington University is committed to achieving excellence through advancing inclusive success, increasing our Washington impact, and focusing on transformational education grounded in the liberal arts and sciences and based on innovative scholarship, research, and creative activity. Western’s greatest strength is the outstanding students, faculty, staff, and alumni/ae who make up its community. Western supports an inclusive governance structure for all and provides a learning and working environment in which everyone can thrive.

In pursuit of this excellence, individual employees are expected to establish and maintain productive and effective inclusive working relationships amongst diverse populations including staff, faculty, administration, student, and external constituents. Further, individual employees are expected to have the ability to operationalize sustainability concepts (economic, societal, environmental) into all aspects of performing their job duties.

The College of Science and Engineering and the Physics and Astronomy Department support Western’s mission, which states that together with our students, staff, and faculty, we are committed to making a positive impact in the state and the world with a shared focus on academic excellence and inclusive achievement. We encourage applications from women, people of color, people with disabilities, veterans, and other candidates from underrepresented backgrounds and with diverse experiences interested in this opportunity.

The Department of Physics and Astronomy is comprised of 16 full-time faculty (tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenure track), 3 full time permanent staff, and ~100 undergraduate physics majors. Physics B.S. degrees are offered in addition to minor degrees in both physics and astronomy. The department strives to support meaningful research opportunities for its majors, including hiring new tenure-track faculty committed to undergraduate research.

Members of the department are also active in the development of new educational materials and innovative teaching methods. The common vision shared within the department is to make the WWU Department of Physics and Astronomy the most outstanding undergraduate program of its kind in the nation.

WWU is committed to creating equitable and inclusive learning and working environments for their students, faculty and staff. A number of faculty-led initiatives and committees focus on diversity and inclusivity in the classroom and beyond. New faculty are supported by mentoring both within the department and through university-wide initiatives, and individual faculty involvement in the Faculty Success Program has recently been supported by our department.

Student clubs such as SACNAS, Physicists for Inclusion in STEM (PhIS), and Out in Science are also vital to advancing inclusion within the college.

Detailed information is available for the Department of Physics and Astronomy at (Use the "Apply for this Job" box below)..edu

Full-time, tenure-track assistant professor, beginning September 2026. Western Washington University (WWU) invites applications from candidates who will contribute to the department’s curriculum at all levels, and establish an active and sustainable research program with opportunities to engage WWU undergraduates.

Teach upper and lower division undergraduate courses in WWU’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, where…