Dennis Livesay has been named the new Graduate School dean and associate vice president of Research and Technology Transfer at Wichita State University, effective April 1, 2016, according to Tony Vizzini, provost and senior vice president at WSU.

"The Graduate School is the keystone at any research university,” said Vizzini. “I am excited to have Dennis’ vision and leadership at such a critical time in the growth of our Innovation University. I look forward to the advancements of our graduate scholars.”

“The vision that President Bardo and the provost have laid out is forward looking and creates new opportunities for WSU, its students and the community,” Livesay said. “I am eager to work with everyone to make the Graduate School a driver within this process. We intend to make sure that our graduate programs are responsive to the needs of our students and local employers, and I want to position the Graduate School as the nexus for interdisciplinary activities, including development of both educational programs and research collaborations."

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

Livesay moved to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2006, where he is a professor of bioinformatics and genomics. He is the founding director of a number of high-visibility programs at Charlotte, including the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology doctoral program and the Charlotte Research Scholars summer program that provides research opportunities to high-achieving undergraduates.

In 2014, Livesay was appointed interim associate dean in the College of Computing and Informatics, where he led a number of initiatives to improve and grow the college’s graduate programs. He is a prior winner of the college’s Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award and Outstanding Research Award.

Livesay is a provost faculty fellow in the Division of Academic Affairs, working to develop a campuswide plan related to undergraduate research opportunities. He also chairs the Graduate Council, which is the faculty governance arm of graduate education.

His research lab has been continuously funded since 2001, primarily by the National Institutes of Health. He has co-authored more than 50 peer-reviewed journal papers in the broad area of protein family sequence/structure/function relationships, and is the editor of a volume in the popular “Methods in Molecular Biology” book series on protein dynamics. He is also on the editorial board of seven journals, including “PLOS Computational Biology,” the top journal in the discipline.