About Us

Office of the President

Dr. Tod A. Laursen

Dr. Tod A. Laursen

Biography

Tod A. Laursen is the President of Khalifa University of Science, Technology and Research , in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.  Prior to becoming President of Khalifa University, Dr. Laursen was Professor and Chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke University (USA). While at Duke he also held academic appointments in civil engineering and biomedical engineering, and served as Senior Associate Dean for Education in Engineering from 2003-2008.  In the latter capacity, he had oversight responsibility for all undergraduate and graduate engineering programs at Duke University, representing a student body of nearly 2000.

Dr. Laursen gained his PhD and MS postgraduate degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University and a BS in the same subject from Oregon State University. He specializes in computational mechanics, a subfield of engineering mechanics concerned with development of new computational algorithms and tools used by engineers to analyze mechanical and structural systems.   He has published over 100 refereed journal articles, conference papers, book chapters, and abstracts in this field, as well as authoring or co-editing two books.  His particular focus is development of methods to analyze contact, impact and frictional phenomena, in highly nonlinear and complex systems.

He is a Fellow of both the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the International Association of Computational Mechanics, and belongs also to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Society for Engineering Education, the United States Association for Computational Mechanics, and Tau Beta Pi.  He served as an at-large member of the Executive Committee for the United States Association for Computational Mechanics between 2007 and 2010, and has served on the scientific advisory committees of several prominent national and international congresses in computational mechanics.


Full CV - click here

President's Academic Advisory Council (PAAC)

Staff of the President Office:

  • Dr. Tod Laursen – President
  • Dr. Arif Al Hammadi – Executive Vice President
  • Ms. Marianne Hassan - Chief of Staff
  • Mr. William Upton – Advisor
  • Ms. Elizabeth Lane - Director, Institutional Research
  • Dr. Rob Milne – Director, Institutional Effectiveness
  • Ms. Maria Yogo – Chief Protocol Officer
  • Mrs. Hala Khalifa – Executive Assistant to the President
  • Mrs. Sherine El Kharadly – Executive Assistant to the Executive Vice President

Speeches and Writings