Luay K. Nakhleh (
Arabic
Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic languages, Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C ...
): لؤي نخله; born May 8, 1974) is a Palestinian-Israeli-American computer scientist and computational biologist who is the William and Stephanie Sick Dean of the
George R. Brown School of Engineering
The George R. Brown School of Engineering is an academic school at Rice University in Houston, Texas. It contains the departments of Bioengineering, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computational Applied ...
, a Professor of Computer Science and a Professor of BioSciences at
Rice University
William Marsh Rice University (Rice University) is a Private university, private research university in Houston, Houston, Texas. It is on a 300-acre campus near the Houston Museum District and adjacent to the Texas Medical Center. Rice is ranke ...
in Houston, Texas.
Biography
Nakhleh was born on May 8, 1974 to a Christian, Palestinian family in Israel. He currently lives with his Japanese wife and two children in Texas, and holds both U.S. and Israeli citizenship.
Nakhleh did his undergraduate studies in the Department of Computer Science at the
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, earning a bachelor's degree in 1996. He earned a master's degree in Computer Science from
Texas A&M University
Texas A&M University (Texas A&M, A&M, or TAMU) is a public, land-grant, research university in College Station, Texas. It was founded in 1876 and became the flagship institution of the Texas A&M University System in 1948. As of late 2021, T ...
in 1998, and a PhD degree in Computer Science from the
University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...
, under the supervision of Prof.
Tandy Warnow
Tandy Warnow is an American computer scientist and Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.Tandy Warnow's , retrieved 2020-09-10. She is known for her work on the reconstruction of evolutio ...
, in 2004. Nakhleh started his academic position at Rice University in July 2004, and became a Full Professor in 2016. He served as the J.S. Abercrombie Professor of Computer Science from July 2018 until December 2020. Nakhleh served as Chair of the Computer Science Department at Rice University from 2017 to 2020.
In addition to his duties as the Dean of Engineering at Rice University, Nakhleh currently teaches courses in discrete mathematics and
computational biology
Computational biology refers to the use of data analysis, mathematical modeling and computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer science, biology, and big data, the field also has fo ...
. Nakhleh has received high acclaim at Rice University for his skills in teaching, and he is the recipient of many awards in this area.
Research
Nakhleh's research has been focused mainly on computational and statistical approaches to phylogenomics and
comparative genomics
Comparative genomics is a field of biological research in which the genomic features of different organisms are compared. The genomic features may include the DNA sequence, genes, gene order, regulatory sequences, and other genomic structural lan ...
under
scenarios where the evolutionary history of the genomes is not treelike. His earlier work in this area focused on parsimonious
phylogenetic network
A phylogenetic network is any graph used to visualize evolutionary relationships (either abstractly or explicitly) between nucleotide sequences, genes, chromosomes, genomes, or species. They are employed when reticulation events such as hybridi ...
s: networks that embed a given set of trees with the lowest number of reticulations, assuming all gene tree incongruence is due to
reticulate evolution
Reticulate evolution, or network evolution is the origination of a lineage through the partial merging of two ancestor lineages, leading to relationships better described by a phylogenetic network than a bifurcating tree. Reticulate patterns ca ...
. He and his colleagues also applied similar approaches to language data to elucidate the (reticulate)
evolutionary history of the
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutc ...
. Their paper on perfect phylogenetic networks was included as one of the 20 best papers published in Language, the flagship journal of the Linguistic Society of America, in the 30-year period 1986-2016.
Later, his work started focusing on statistical approaches, in order to account for other evolutionary processes that could be at play in genomic data sets, most notably
incomplete lineage sorting
Incomplete lineage sorting, also termed hemiplasy, deep coalescence, retention of ancestral polymorphism, or trans-species polymorphism, describes a phenomenon in population genetics when ancestral gene copies fail to coalesce (looking backwards i ...
. These approaches could be viewed as approximations of the multispecies
coalescent
''Coalescent'' is a science-fiction novel by Stephen Baxter. It is part one of the ''Destiny's Children'' series. The story is set in two main time periods: modern Britain, when George Poole finds that he has a previously unknown sister and f ...
with gene flow.
Additionally, Nakhleh has done research on biological networks (modeling and evolution) and, more recently, on computational questions arising in cancer genomics.
Nakhleh and his group have been developing PhyloNet,
[http://bioinfo.cs.rice.edu/~phylonet] an open-source software package, implemented in Java, for inference and analysis of (explicit) phylogenetic networks.
Honors and awards
Nakhleh's honors and awards include:
* The National Science Foundation
CAREER Award, 2009.
* The
Sloan Fellowship
The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States.
...
in the Molecular Biology category, 2010.
* The
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...
in the Organismic Biology and Ecology category, 2012.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nakhleh, Nuay
Living people
Rice University faculty
American computer scientists
1974 births