About Our Speakers

President Emeritus, University of Texas at Dallas

Dr. David E. Daniel is President Emeritus of The University of Texas at Dallas and an Engineering Consultant in Dallas, Texas. He earned BS, MS, and PhD degrees in civil engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, and served on the faculty at UT Austin from 1981 to 1996. His research focused on environmental controls for contaminated land and groundwater. From 1996 until 2005, he served as Head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and then as Dean of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. From 2005 to 2015 he served as President of The University of Texas at Dallas. From 2015 to 2018 he served as Deputy Chancellor and Chief Operating Officer of The University of Texas System in Austin. Honors include the Normal Medal, Croes Medal, Middlebrooks Award, Presidents Award, Opal Award for Education, Terzaghi Lecture, and Geotechnical Hero’s Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 2000. Past service includes chairing the External Review Panel for ASCE to investigate the causes of the levee failures and flooding of New Orleans as a result of Hurricane Katrina, and service on the NAE panel that investigated the causes for the blowout and explosion of Deepwater Horizon.