Erick C. Jones Jr., PhD, PE

About

Erick C. Jones Jr. is an assistant professor in the Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering department and an affiliate of the Resource and Energy Engineering program at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he founded the Sustainable and Efficient Allocation of Resources (SEAR) Lab and directs the Radio Frequency and Auto-ID (RAID) Lab.

His work focuses on energy and critical mineral systems — studied end to end and back, from extraction through manufacturing, deployment, and monitoring to end-of-life recovery and back to materials. He applies that toolkit to problems as varied as systems engineering for Navy electrical power systems and RFID-powered naloxone tracking networks addressing the opioid epidemic, and a newly awarded USDA project will use smart-trap technology to help combat screwworms.

He has published more than 50 journal articles, conference papers and reports, most of them since he joined UT Arlington in 2021. His 2019 paper on shared autonomous vehicles and climate change mitigation is cited by the IPCC. Each of the lab’s projects lists the papers that came out of it; the complete, current list is on Google Scholar and ORCID, and his full CV covers the rest: funding, teaching, students and service.

He believes societies thrive or struggle on the infrastructure they build, and that infrastructure is never only physical, so his research is organised around its three layers: physical, digital and institutional.

He is a licensed Professional Engineer in Texas. Before graduate school he worked as a process engineer at AMEC Foster Wheeler and a project engineer at Johnson Controls, across oil and gas, engineering design and building systems. Traveling for that work, he saw how the absence of basic infrastructure (reliable electricity, clean water, climate control, internet and banking) constrains quality of life across much of the world, and concluded that the most consequential engineering problems sit at the junctions between energy, the materials that enable it, the assets that use it and the communities that depend on it. That conviction took him back to graduate school, and later to found the SEAR Lab.

Service

He is an elected director of IISE’s Energy Systems Division, and chaired the energy cluster of INFORMS’s Energy, Natural Resources and the Environment section in 2023 and 2024. He advised Texas legislators and their staff on energy policy through the Powerhouse Texas Energy Policy Advisory Council (2023–2025), co-authored an IEEE Power & Energy Society technical report on grid modernization, and takes part in NAATBatt International’s open industry working groups on battery supply chains and recycling. Locally, he serves on the board of Green Careers Texas, which trains Texans for careers in solar and building science, and led a City of Dallas pilot that weatherized homes while training local residents for that work. He reviews for NSF and several journals, advises UTA’s student chapters of INFORMS and NSBE, and judges the Fort Worth Regional Science and Engineering Fair.

University committees. Chair of the IMSE Undergraduate Curriculum Committee (2026–), and a member of the College of Engineering and REE undergraduate curriculum committees and the IMSE admissions and scholarship committees. He has served on faculty search committees in Electrical Engineering and for UTA’s Associate Vice President for Research and REE program director, advises teams for UTA Innovation Day, and sits on the host committee for the 2026 IISE Annual Conference in Arlington.

Boards and advisory roles. Board member of Tellimus/Green+ (2026–) and Green Careers Texas (2021–2026); academic advisory committee of the Texas Energy Poverty Research Institute (TEPRI, 2021–); advisory councils for the Texas Energy Summit (2024–2025) and Fort Worth’s transportation plan, Moving 1 Million (2024–2025); university representative to the GEM Consortium; and guest editor of an Energies special issue on energy poverty (2023).

Community and volunteer. President (2024–2026) and earlier vice president of the Carter-Riverside Neighborhood Association in Fort Worth. Before his PhD: the City of Austin Sustainable Buildings Taskforce, project development for Urban Roots farm in Austin, and volunteering with Big Brothers Big Sisters, United Way and BakerRipley in Houston.

Honors

Education

He is a native Texan who has traveled all habitable continents with only a backpack.