David W. Leebron

David W. Leebron has served as Rice University’s seventh president since 2004, a period of growth and transformation for the institution. 

Early in his presidency, Leebron engaged in extensive consultations that produced the Vision for the Second Century, a plan for Rice’s growth and advancement as one of the world’s premier research universities. As Rice approaches its centennial anniversary in 2012, the university is well-positioned for its second hundred years.

Undergraduate enrollment has increased 30 percent since 2004. Applications more than doubled to 13,795 for the fall 2011 class, with 9,000 applications from outside of Texas. International applicants increased fivefold. Undergraduate and graduate students come from 89 countries.

Much like Rice’s first president, Edgar Odell Lovett, Leebron has a powerful international vision and has reached out to Asia and Latin America. New study-abroad programs in Argentina and India have been added, along with study and research opportunities in China, Brazil and Turkey.

Leebron also has strengthened the university’s local presence with programs that connect students and faculty with the Greater Houston community, such as Rice’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, home to the Houston Area Survey.

Under Leebron’s leadership, the campus has added two new residential colleges; the 10-story BioScience Research Collaborative, where scientists and educators from Rice and other Texas Medical Center institutions work together; a new recreation and wellness center; an additional food servery; a central campus pavilion that serves as a meeting and study place; an updated sports arena; a new physics building; and the Public Art Program, a presidential initiative that has added beautiful art across campus.

Prior to taking the helm at Rice, Leebron was dean of Columbia Law School. A native of Philadelphia, he is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, where he was elected president of the Law Review in his second year. After graduating in 1979, he served as a law clerk for Judge Shirley Hufstedler on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Los Angeles. He began teaching at the UCLA School of Law in 1980 and at the NYU School of Law in 1983.

In 1989, Leebron joined the faculty of Columbia Law School, and in 1996 he was appointed dean and the Lucy G. Moses Professor of Law. Leebron also served as a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, Germany, and as the Jean Monnet Visiting Professor of Law at Bielefeld University. He is currently part of the political science faculty at Rice and has authored a textbook on international human rights.

In 2006, Leebron was presented with France’s Commandeur de l’Ordre national du Mérite, and in 2008, he received an honorary doctorate from Nankai University. In 2010, Leebron and his wife, University Representative Y. Ping Sun, were selected by the Greater Houston Partnership as the city’s International Executives of the Year for helping make Houston a center of international business.

 

   
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Leebron and Sun have two children, Daniel and Merissa.