Dennis Livesay

Biography

Dr. Livesay is the Dean of the College of Computing at Michigan Technological University, a role he began in 2021. He comes to Tech with significant administrative experience, this being his third deanship. Immediately prior, he was the Dean of the College of Engineering at Wichita State University, where he was also a tenured full professor in both the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Department of Chemistry. At Wichita State, he also held positions as Dean of the Graduate School and Associate Vice President for Research & Technology Transfer. Prior still, he was a founding member of the Department of Bioinformatics & Genomics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Other roles at UNC Charlotte include Interim Associate Dean of the College of Computing & Informatics, Provost Faculty Fellow, (founding) Director of the Charlotte Research Scholars, and (founding) Director of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Ph.D. program. Dr. Livesay began his career as a faculty member in the Chemistry Department at California State Polytechnic University-Pomona.

Dr. Livesay has spent his entire career working across discipline boundaries, a mindset that he brings to his administrative roles. His research spans biophysics, chemistry, computing, and data science with the goal of understanding protein family sequence/structure/function relationships. In particular, the bulk of Dr. Livesay's research has focused on understanding how physical and chemical properties vary with evolutionary divergence and what are the consequences of those differences. Dr. Livesay has been key personnel on over $13M of external funding ($11.3M as principal investigator). During his research career, his lab was primarily funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health and MedImmune, a large biotech company. He has been a grant reviewer for the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Research Corporation, and the W.M. Keck Foundation, and has served on the editorial board of multiple journals, including BMC Bioinformatics and PLOS Computational Biology, two of the top journals in the discipline.