As Dr. Lori Bruce takes the reins as UTC chancellor, she won’t need a map to find her way across the region.
After all, she grew up just 90 minutes west of Chattanooga on a working farm in Lincoln County—an upbringing she credits with shaping her resourcefulness and lifelong passion for education.
“I grew up in a rural area and my siblings and I had the freedom to roam in the woods and play and build forts and huts,” Bruce recalled. “So much about that rural life, being on a farm and growing up that way, taught me the values of creativity, industriousness and resilience.
“When you live on a farm, every day brings challenges. The cows get out and you have to go. I remember as a small child my dad saying, ‘Lori, hold the line’ because you were trying to get cows back into a pasture and the cow was 10 times my size. Being brave and standing firm when faced with that as a young child instills in you a boldness and a real confidence that you can solve problems.”
That early self-assurance became the foundation of a philosophy she still lives by, and her leadership approach can be described in one clear sentence: “When others see obstacles, I see opportunities.”
That philosophy, she explained, reflects a way of thinking that’s become second nature over time.
“I don’t know how else to describe it except to say it’s innate to how I think,” Bruce said. “It’s something a mentor once pointed out to me years ago. I didn’t even realize it was a pattern until I was told, ‘You always reframe challenges. You don’t get stuck.’ And that’s true. Change isn’t an obstacle. It’s a moment to engage.”
After nearly three decades in higher education as a scholar, researcher, professor and administrator, Bruce is now the 19th leader in the University’s history.
She comes to UTC after serving as provost and vice president for academic affairs at Tennessee Tech since 2018, where she led academic operations for more than 10,000 students across eight colleges.
Under her leadership, Tennessee Tech achieved a perfect academic program quality score from the state—an accomplishment unmatched in over four decades. She led the development and launch of multiple new academic programs at the bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. levels, each aligning with statewide and regional workforce needs.
Bruce spearheaded efforts to increase annual research funding from $16 million to more than $46 million, with projections indicating even higher figures for this fiscal year. She led the college through $350 million in capital improvements to campus infrastructure, from cutting-edge STEM facilities to large-scale building renovations.
She also established the Center for Advancing Faculty Excellence, implemented a campus-wide compensation study that led to pay increases across faculty and staff ranks, and worked to foster a supportive culture around professional development.
At UTC, that same mindset will guide her approach to building on the University’s upward momentum, she said, and reaching Carnegie R2 research status is in UTC’s “not-too-distant future.”
“Being an emerging R2, this is an exciting time. We get to support faculty who have an entrepreneurial mindset and provide them with resources to help turn their ideas into real, innovative solutions that address societal needs,” she said. “When I think about research, there are three key aspects to it: there’s grantsmanship, there’s research—which is the actual creation of new knowledge—and there’s scholarship, which is the dissemination of that new knowledge to others.
“I know that as we grow, especially in areas like research, some people might worry that we’re changing who we are. But growth isn’t subtraction. It’s addition. Research doesn’t take away from students; it creates new opportunities for students to be part of something bigger. It brings new energy into the classroom and the community.”
Bruce’s academic journey began at Lincoln County High School in Fayetteville, Tennessee, where a career counselor noticed her aptitude for math and science.
She was encouraged to consider engineering, a recommendation that led to a job shadowing opportunity at the Arnold Engineering Development Complex in Tullahoma.
“I got in the wind tunnels and it was exciting,” she recalled. “I loved seeing the models of the planes; they had these gases that they blew across the models creating contrails and you could actually see the fluid flow. I just thought that was fantastic.
“I walked away from that job shadowing saying, ‘I want to be an engineer.’”
She went on to earn a bachelor’s and Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Alabama in Huntsville—as well as a master’s in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech. She also completed graduate coursework in biomedical engineering through the Georgia Tech/Emory Medical School joint program.
Bruce talked about how some of her earliest research confirmed that she was “on the right career path.”
“From day one, learning about technologies that had the potential to have a great impact on people’s lives really excited me. One of the first projects I worked on was a four-chamber fetal echocardiogram. It’s an ultrasonic image of a fetus’ heart,” she said, detailing how she worked on algorithms designed to detect congenital heart defects. “The mathematical underpinnings of machine learning algorithms for doing automated analysis is what people now refer to as AI.
“Later, when I was picking a dissertation topic, I wrote a proposal to get funding to work on the same concept—but with mammograms. I wanted to work on applying machine learning to the analysis of mammograms to help radiologists be more effective at reading mammograms and determining whether there was a risk of cancer for the patient.”
Her higher education career encompasses extensive experience in both academic and administrative roles. Prior to her tenure at Tennessee Tech, she served as associate vice president for academic affairs and dean of the Graduate School at Mississippi State University. During her time on that campus, she also held appointments as Giles distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering; associate dean for research and graduate studies in the Bagley College of Engineering; executive director of the High Performance Computing Collaboratory; and interim director of the Raspet Flight Research Laboratory.
As a faculty member, she led research projects funded with more than $20 million from federal and industry partners, resulting in over 150 peer-reviewed scholarly publications that have been cited more than 6,000 times.
But it wasn’t just the research that drew her in, she said. It was the ability to showcase her entrepreneurial side.
“I always viewed being a faculty member like being a little startup company—very entrepreneurial,” she said. “I’m having to generate the ideas, go find a way to fund those ideas, build teams of students and other faculty, and turn those ideas into reality.
“To me, being a faculty member provides a fantastic platform for doing that. And now— as a leader—I want to provide the opportunities for others to do that, too.”
Bruce said she views UTC as uniquely positioned in today’s higher education landscape thanks to the University’s scale and collaborative culture.
“We’re at that perfect size,” she said. “Large enough to have a wide range of disciplines and strong academic programs but small enough that people talk to each other, work together and support one another.”
She believes one of the University’s most essential responsibilities is preparing students to adapt.
“We’re not just training students for their first job out of college,” she said. “We’re helping them build careers that span decades, often in fields that don’t even exist yet.
“Yes, our job is to equip them with content knowledge—but also creativity, communication, critical thinking and resilience.”
Bruce regularly speaks to students about the power of determination and grit, emphasizing that perseverance often outweighs raw talent in achieving success.
“You can be the smartest person in the room, but if you give up the first time you hit a roadblock, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “What makes the difference is the ability to keep going and reframe setbacks as setups for comebacks.”
That message resonates strongly with first-generation college students, a population Bruce is especially passionate about supporting. While she doesn’t fall into that category herself, she witnessed firsthand the transformative power of higher education in her own home.
She shared the story of how her parents, Charles and Judy Mann, changed her “entire family’s trajectory.”
“After they graduated high school, my mom and dad both went straight into factory jobs and worked in clothing factories. My dad recently shared a story with me about it. He said that his job was to staple boxes; he built cardboard boxes and he stapled them. After being there for a while, they gave an aptitude test to the people in the factory. He scored very high, so they said, ‘OK, what we want you to do is help us computerize the factory. We’re going to send you to Georgia Tech for training to learn about computers and you’re going to help us computerize the factory.’
“Even though he wasn’t formally a college student, he was educated in programming and became a working computer scientist.
“When I was 11 or 12 years old, my mother said, ‘I really want to go to college,’ so she and her sister (Cheryl Womack) quit their factory jobs and started college. They enrolled at Motlow State Community College and then went on to Middle Tennessee State.
“Those years—my tween years—were incredibly formative for me. I saw my mom doing homework late at night, running a household with lots of kids, helping my dad on the farm—he would run the farm at night while she studied—and still showing up for class every single day.
“She would come home and tell us about the amazing things she learned; it might be about Aztec Indians or a math proof that she did. She was just genuinely excited to have the opportunity to learn. She had this real love of learning and it left a mark on me that shaped everything.”
Her mom went on to have a long career as a high school math teacher.
“Both my mom and my dad had the opportunity to become educated, to learn and to really make a difference—not only in their careers but in our entire family’s trajectory,” Bruce continued. “That is a big part of why I am passionate about higher education because of the difference that it makes in people’s lives.”
Now, she and her husband, Dr. JW Bruce—a professor of electrical engineering—are both joining the UTC family. The two met as undergraduates in an electrical engineering class at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and have been married since 1993.
Their son, Walker, is a sophomore at UT Knoxville majoring in industrial engineering.
“He’s a born engineer,” she said, laughing, “and very outdoorsy. He’s an Eagle Scout who loves hiking, kayaking, hunting. He’s had a great start at UTK and he’s excited that now we’re all in the UT System together.”
Outside of work, Bruce enjoys staying busy with hands-on creative projects.
“What would people be surprised to learn about me? I truly have never met a craft I didn’t want to do,” she said. “I love to sew. I love embroidery. I love textiles. I have multiple sewing machines. I’ve never been formally trained in any of it, but I’ve actually had my works exhibited. And I love doing very, very miniature scale pieces.
“I think that spirit of finding innovative ways to make something out of nothing has been inside me going back to my time growing up. It has shaped my approach as a professional, as a leader and as a person.”