2017 Commencement Speaker: Dr. Jean-Lou Chameau

Dear KAUST Community, I am pleased to welcome Dr. Jean-Lou Chameau, former KAUST President, as our 2017 Commencement Speaker. For those of us who had the pleasure of working with Jean-Lou during his tenure, we can attest to his leadership capabilities and commitment to excellence. Under Jean-Lou’s leadership, KAUST’s maturing global reputation allowed the University to strengthen our strategic academic and industry partnerships. Key initiatives in sensors, material science, epigenetics and big data continue to serve as platforms for KAUST to engage science and technology leaders from within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and around the world to solve society’s grand challenges.
I would like to share with you some highlights of Jean-Lou’s illustrious academic and leadership career before he joined KAUST as our second President in July 2013:

• Jean-Lou is President Emeritus of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), an institution he led from 2006 to 2013. Caltech is one of the world’s preeminent centers of instruction and research in engineering and science, as well as the home of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). During his tenure as president, Caltech became number one in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings and JPL successfully landed the rover Curiosity on Mars.
• Between 2001 and 2006, Jean-Lou served as the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to that, he served as the Dean of the College of Engineering and held the position of Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar.
  After completing his Ph.D. in civil engineering from Stanford University, Jean-Lou had a distinguished career as a professor and administrator at Purdue University.
• Jean-Lou briefly left academia for the private sector, serving as president of Golder Associates, an international geotechnical consulting company.
• He has received numerous awards for his research, contributions as an educator and academic leader. In his native France, he was elected Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. He is a member of both the French Académie des Technologies and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.
• Jean-Lou also has been active on industry and public boards, including those of InterWest, Internet2, John Wiley & Sons, MTS Systems, Maaden, Safran, Ecole Polytechnique, the U.S. Council on Competitiveness and the Academic Research Council of Singapore.

Throughout his career, Jean-Lou promoted industry-university partnerships and the involvement of universities in economic development, including the development of start-ups and new businesses, and advancing entrepreneurial and international opportunities for faculty and students. He excelled at securing and stewarding resources from public and private sources, allowing faculty and students to pursue their dreams and the universities to become destinations and catalysts for innovation and economic development.

I look forward to welcoming Jean-Lou back to our beautiful campus. I believe we will all find his reflections and perspectives a memorable feature of our 2017 Commencement Ceremony.

Regards,
Nadhmi A. Al-Nasr
Interim President