Luay Nakhleh
William and Stephanie Sick Dean
George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing
Luay Nakhleh is the William and Stephanie Sick Dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering at Rice University, where he leads a prestigious, top-ranked engineering school comprising nine departments, 163 faculty and 3,148 students. In addition to his role as Dean, he is a professor in both the Department of Computer Science and the Department of BioSciences.
Born in Israel, Nakhleh earned his bachelor’s degree from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in 1996, a master’s degree from Texas A&M University in 1998, and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2004, all in computer science. He began his career at Rice University in July 2004 as a tenure-track assistant professor.
Nakhleh served as chair of Rice’s Department of Computer Science from 2017 to 2020, leading the university’s largest academic department at Rice. Now, as Dean of Engineering, he oversees Rice’s largest academic school.
Nakhleh’s research at the intersection of computing and biology focuses on developing new methodologies and software to study the history of both specific genes and entire genomes, and the genetic links between species. He has also engaged in interdisciplinary research in computational historical linguistics. Over his career, he has supervised the theses of 26 PhD students and 17 master’s students and mentored six postdocs and over sixty undergraduates. He published his work in over 140 peer-reviewed manuscripts, gave over 100 invited talks, and obtained over $17M in external funding.
An accomplished educator and researcher, Nakhleh has been recognized with numerous prestigious awards. He received the Teaching and Research Excellence Award in 2015 and the Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Adviser Award in 2018. In 2019, he was honored with Rice’s highest teaching accolade, the George R. Brown Prize for Excellence in Teaching, followed by the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching in 2020 and 2024. Nakhleh is a recipient of multiple research awards, including election as Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (2024), election as Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (2023), a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2012), a Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2010), a National Science Foundation CAREER award (2009), and a Department of Energy Early Career Principal Investigator Award (2006).