Dr. Brian Moran
Acting Provost
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
Dr. Moran assumed his duties as the Interim Provost in April 2009. Previously, he served as Chair of the Civil and Environmental Engineering
Department at Northwestern University in the United States.
Related Media
Dr. Brian Moran joined KAUST in September 2008 as Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Chair of the Earth and Environmental Sciences and Engineering
Division. He was later named Acting Provost.
As the University's chief academic officer, Dr. Moran works to provide opportunities and facilities for researchers and students to address the important
scientific issues at the core of KAUST's mission.
Prior to joining KAUST, Dr. Moran served as chair of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Northwestern University in the United States,
where he chaired an advisory board that developed a program in Architectural Engineering and Design. During an earlier stint as chair of the Mechanical
Engineering Department, Dr. Moran established a research thrust in neural engineering while also leading the department through program review and accreditation.
Dr. Moran has published more than 100 technical articles and is co-author of Nonlinear Finite Elements for Continua and Structures. He received a best
paper award from SPIE, NDE Symposium in 2005.
His research interests are in multi-scale computational science and engineering, fracture mechanics and plasticity, and the use of novel techniques,
such as extended finite element and level set methods for moving boundary value problems.
Dr. Moran is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He was elected to the board of directors of the Society of Engineering Science and
serves as secretary of that organization. He co-chaired the Seventh World Congress on Computational Mechanics in Los Angeles in 2006.
Students elected Dr. Moran to the Northwestern Faculty Honor Roll for Teaching on two separate occasions. He also received the W.M. Keck Foundation Award
for Engineering Teaching Excellence.
He received the National University of Ireland Bursary in Civil Engineering for study abroad and spent a year as an IBM Research Fellow at the California
Institute of Technology before joining Northwestern in 1988.
Dr. Moran earned a bachelor's of engineering in Civil Engineering and a master's of engineering in Mechanical Engineering from the National University of
Ireland, Galway. He later received a master's of science in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Solid Mechanics from Brown University in the United States.