Dennis Livesay

Biography

Dr. Dennis Livesay is a computational biophysical chemist and university administrator, now serving as the Dave House Dean of Computing at Michigan Technological University. He formerly served in a pair of dean roles at Wichita State University, first as dean of the Graduate School and later as dean of the College of Engineering. Before joining Wichita State, Dr. Livesay was a professor and founding member of the Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He began his career as a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. In addition to being a three-time dean, Dr. Livesay has held positions of associate vice president of research and technology transfer, institutional officer, provost faculty fellow, graduate council chair, (founding) director of the Bioinformatics and Genomics PhD program, (founding) director of the Charlotte Research Scholars research program, president of the College of Computing and Informatics faculty, and interim associate dean.

Dr. Livesay’s scholarship (external funding = $14.6M and h-index = 27) is highly interdisciplinary, and draws on aspects of chemistry, computing, physics, biology, and engineering. Specifically, he is focused on understanding how physicochemical properties vary with evolutionary divergence. Based on this broad background, he has held tenured/tenure-track appointments in departments of applied computing, bioinformatics, biomedical engineering, chemistry, and computer science. Dr. Livesay is the editor of a volume in the popular Methods in Molecular Biology book series on protein dynamics and also edited a special issue of Current Opinion in Pharmacology on the same topic. He has served on the editorial board of seven journals, including BMC Bioinformatics and PLOS Computational Biology.