Luay Nakhleh is the William and Stephanie Sick Dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing at Rice University, where he also serves as a professor of Computer Science and Biosciences, and is a former chair of the Department of Computer Science.

He holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, a master's degree from Texas A&M University, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin, awarded in 2004. Dr. Nakhleh joined the Rice faculty that same year. He served as chair of the Department of Computer Science from 2017 to 2020 and was appointed dean in January 2021.

Dr. Nakhleh’s research lies at the intersection of computing and biology, with a focus on developing novel computational methodologies and software to study the evolutionary history of genes and genomes, as well as the genetic relationships among species.

During his tenure as department chair, Computer Science became the largest academic department at Rice University, comprising 312 undergraduate majors and 258 graduate students. Under his leadership, the faculty expanded to 35 members with primary appointments in the department, in addition to joint and adjunct faculty.

Dr. Nakhleh has received numerous honors and awards throughout his career. These include the Department of Energy CAREER Award (2006), the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2009), an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2010, in Molecular Biology), and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2012, in Organismic Biology and Ecology).

He has been recognized multiple times for his teaching and mentoring excellence, receiving the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award in 2009, the Teaching and Research Excellence Award from the School of Engineering at Rice in 2015, the Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Adviser Award in 2018, the George R. Brown Prize for Excellence in Teaching—Rice University's most prestigious teaching award—in 2019, and the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching in both 2020 and 2024.

Dr. Nakhleh was elected Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in 2023, Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) in 2024, and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2024.