What to Know About Rice University President Reginald DesRoches

Reginald DesRoches is the eighth president of Rice University, one of the highest-ranked private institutions in the country.

Here’s what you need to know about the administrator.

DesRoches was a historic choice when he took the helm in 2022. Many have noted the importance, particularly because of Rice’s racial history: a slave owner reserved the university for white residents only, and the campus did not accept its first black undergraduate student until 1965.

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DesRoches was born in 1967 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and raised in Queens, New York. Neither of his parents had a college degree, but they instilled the importance of education in DesRoches and his siblings. His father said they could be one of four things when they grew up: “a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer or a disappointment,” DesRoches said.

He pursued a degree in mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley, where he also earned a master’s degree in civil engineering and a doctorate in structural engineering. One of his siblings became a doctor, another became a lawyer, and a third is a CFO at AT&T.

The researcher said he found his career path after witnessing the damage caused by the Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco in 1989, which led him to think about how structural engineering and improved design could help structures perform better during earthquakes.

His expertise made him a leader in the U.S. response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake, which killed more than 316,000 people and caused at least $8 billion in damage. DesRoches led a team of 28 engineers, architects, urban planners and social scientists to study the impact of the natural disaster, according to Rice. He also participated in congressional briefings on the role that academic research can play in infrastructure management ahead of such events.

DesRoches’ work has earned him numerous awards. Among them are the 2015 Charles Martin Duke Lifeline Earthquake Engineering Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers and the 2007 ASCE Walter L. Huber Award for Research in Civil Engineering. He won the Distinguished Lecturer Award from the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute in 2018.

He is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the society’s Structural Engineering Institute. DesRoches is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Philosophical Society of Texas.

DesRoches spent nearly 20 years at the Georgia Institute of Technology, rising through the ranks to become president of the school of civil and environmental engineering. There, his fundraising efforts helped double the number of endowed chairs and professorships, and he oversaw a $13.5 million renovation of the engineering school’s main facilities.

He also served as a liaison between the university faculty and its athletic department and was later named to the Atlantic Coast Conference leadership team.

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DesRoches arrived at Rice in 2017. As dean of the School of Engineering, he led the largest school on campus and expanded the faculty by nearly 20%. At the same time, he strengthened collaborations with the Texas Medical Center, launched new interdisciplinary initiatives and led efforts to boost research and recruitment in China and India.

In 2019, DesRoches became the highest-ranking African American in Rice history with an appointment to provost. He led faculty through the COVID-19 crisis by quickly transitioning to remote learning, and he created new partnerships with the Texas Medical Center, launched a new undergraduate business major, and created the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

DesRoches succeeded longtime President David Leebron in 2022. Continuing the efforts he began as dean, he is now leading the first major expansion of the undergraduate student body in more than a decade. He also announced plans to hire more than 200 new teachers within five years.

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The growth effort is accompanied by a planned $300 million in physical projects, upon project launch in 2021. A new student center, two residence halls and a new dining hall are in the works.

Diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives remain on his list of priorities in the presidential office. And DesRoches has already launched several new research institutes in hopes of putting graduate programs on par with better-known undergraduate programs.

DesRoches wrote an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle after affirmative action ended, expressing disappointment with the decision while affirming his commitment to pursuing a diverse student body.

Rice administrators are making clear their support for diversity, equity and inclusion, which continues at the university while its public sector peers can no longer fund such offices in Texas. In October 2023, DesRoches told Bloomberg that Texas’ conservative political environment still had a negative effect on faculty recruiting.

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As dean and then president, DesRoches focused on recruiting diverse faculty and staff. Since 2017, the number of Black professors at Rice has nearly doubled.

DesRoches also launched partnerships with historically black colleges and universities, including Texas Southern University, and championed programs for underrepresented minorities and first-generation students.

In his roles as provost and president, DesRoches supported the Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice in its work to address Rice’s fraught racial history. He is currently overseeing a redesign of the Academic Quadrangle, which will recontextualize a statue of the university’s controversial founder.

More recently, DesRoches has worked with members of the Jewish community who remain concerned about anti-Semitism at Rice.

Students and faculty can occasionally spot DesRoches running through the university’s famous oak trees in the morning.

In 2022, he raised awareness of frequent prostate cancer screenings by announcing that he had undergone surgery for the disease.

DesRoches is married to Paula DesRoches, a nurse practitioner and occupational health consultant at Houston Methodist, according to the university. They have three children, one of whom was a student and football player at Rice.