Dennis Livesay

headshot of Dennis Livesay

Dean and Professor, College of Engineering, Wichita State University

Dr. Dennis R. Livesay is an expert in graduate enrollment management and the evolving credentialing landscape. His career prominently features a number of successful new program development activities, including broad adoption of stackable certificates and other types of alternate credentials. He is currently the dean of the College of Engineering at Wichita State University, and has served in many different academic roles, including Associate Vice President of Research and Technology Transfer, Dean of the Graduate School (both also at Wichita State), Provost Faculty Fellow, Interim Dean of the College of Computing and Informatics, Founding Director of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology PhD program, and Founding Director of the Charlotte Research Scholars (the last four all being at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte).

Dr. Livesay received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2000 and started his academic career immediately thereafter at California State Polytechnic University at Pomona.

Dr. Livesay is also a successful researcher, having published over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles integrating physical, analytical, and computational methods to study protein family evolution. His lab was continuously funded by external grants, primarily 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 seven journals, including BMC Bioinformatics and PLOS Computational Biology, two of the top journals in his research discipline.