Dennis Livesay

Biography

Dr. Dennis Livesay is the Dave House Dean of Computing at Michigan Technological University, a role he began in 2021. He formerly served as the dean of the College of Engineering at Wichita State University, where he also served as the dean of the Graduate School and associate vice president of research and technology transfer. 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 and an associate vice president, Dr. Livesay has held positions of Provost faculty fellow, Graduate Council chair, (founding) director of the Bioinformatics and Genomics PhD program at UNC Charlotte, (founding) director of the Charlotte Research Scholars, president of the College of Computing and Informatics faculty, interim associate dean, and institutional officer.

Dr. Livesay’s research (external funding = $14.6M and h-index = 27) is extremely 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 had tenured/tenure-track appointments in departments of applied computing, bioinformatics, biomedical engineering, chemistry (x2), 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.