Joseph Hartman

Joseph C. Hartman will assume the role of President of Western New England University (WNE) in Springfield, Massachusetts, on June 1, 2026. WNE enrolls more than 2,500 undergraduate and 1,000 graduate students and includes Colleges of Arts and Sciences, Business, Engineering, Pharmacy and Health Sciences, and a School of Law.

Hartman currently serves as Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic and Student Affairs at the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UMass Lowell), where he is the Chief Academic Officer for five colleges, approximately 800 full-time equivalent faculty, and 17,500 students, while also overseeing student affairs. Previously, he served as Dean of the Francis College of Engineering at UMass Lowell.

An industrial and systems engineer, Hartman’s research and teaching focus on engineering economic decision analysis and applied optimization. He has published more than 100 scholarly papers, with research support from the National Science Foundation (including a CAREER Award), the Office of Naval Research, and industry partners. He has taught engineering economy, quality management, production logistics, and operations research, and is author of Engineering Economy and the Decision-Making Process and co-author of The Economic Analysis of Industrial Projects. He is a Fellow and past President (2016–2019) of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers and former Editor of The Engineering Economist.

Before joining UMass Lowell, Hartman served as professor and chair of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida and previously at Lehigh University, where he held the George N. Kledaras ’87 Endowed Chair. He has also held visiting appointments at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Dortmund.

A native of the Chicago area, Hartman earned his B.S. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He and his wife have three children.