Dear Rice colleagues,
Strong and steady leadership is key to achieving Rice’s strategic goals in teaching, research and innovation. On that note, I’m pleased to share that Luay Nakhleh has been reappointed dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing, effective July 1.
In his first term as dean, Luay has grown the school’s faculty, launched critical new academic programs and worked collaboratively with others across campus in support of the university’s goals. Under Luay’s leadership, 59 tenured and tenure-track faculty joined the school, including two members of the National Academy of Engineering. To ensure that new faculty fit within the school’s five key research priorities — health and well-being, energy and sustainability, resilient and adaptive communities, advanced materials and future computing — Luay has requested faculty lines and hired by research area, rather than by department. These themes align with the key drivers in the Momentous strategic plan . Engineering and computing faculty also lead six of Rice’s interdisciplinary research institutes and actively contribute to almost all of them. The school’s research expenditures went up from almost $71 million in fiscal year 2020 to almost $102 million in fiscal year 2024, a 45% increase.
Luay is a great collaborator across the university. Engineering and computing departments offer three of the four required courses in a new sport analytics concentration in the School of Social Sciences’ sport management program, and the data science minor is a joint effort with the School of Sciences and the School of Humanities. The tremendously successful Data to Knowledge (D2K) Lab brings together interdisciplinary teams of students, faculty and industry partners to make an impact through data science.
During Luay’s time as dean, the School of Engineering and Computing has expanded its academic offerings, starting a new undergraduate major in operations research and launching on-campus and online master’s programs in data science and engineering management and leadership online. The Master of Engineering Management and Leadership is the first on campus to have stackable credits, which can be put toward professional certifications. The number of students in the school went from 2,500 in fall 2020 to more than 3,000 in fall 2024, an increase of 28%.
Luay and the school’s leadership have traveled internationally with top university officials to establish strong academic partnerships with institutions in other countries, including Argentina, Mexico, India and the United Arab Emirates. The school launched the Mehta Rice Engineering Scholars Program , which every year brings a cohort of graduate students from India to spend three–six months in Rice faculty’s labs. The ultimate goal is to enhance the visibility of Rice among India’s top academic institutions and to attract more students from those institutions into our graduate programs.
Luay has continued his research and teaching while serving as dean. Since starting as dean in January 2021, he graduated two master’s students and six Ph.D. students. He taught both undergraduate and graduate courses while serving as dean and received the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching in 2024 , after winning the same award in 2020 and the George R. Brown Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 2019. He was elected fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology in 2023 and of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2024. He has published in top journals and conference proceedings, including Nature, Nature Communications, Genome Research and PLoS Genetics. Furthermore, during the four years, he secured almost $4.5M in funding as principal investigator or co-principal investigator.
Please join me in congratulating Luay and supporting the School of Engineering and Computing’s endeavors during his second term as dean.
Warm regards,
Provost Amy Dittmar