George Turkiyyah is currently a researcher in the Extreme Computing Research center at KAUST. He served as chair of the Computer Science department at the American University of Beirut (AUB) during 2010-2013. He obtained his MS and PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in Civil and Environmental Engineering, and his BE from AUB. Prior to joining AUB, he was at the University of Washington. His research interests are in numerical simulation, numerical optimization, high-performance computing, and geometric modeling. He has developed a number of widely used simulation codes for high resolution finite element engineering applications. His work on fast methods for surgical simulation has led to a software startup, and his work on geometric representation technologies has led to a number of patents. He has won a number of awards including the 2003 Transportation Research Board K.B. Woods award for best paper in Design and Construction, best presentation/poster awards in the 2007 ACM Solid and Physical Modeling and the 2006 Medicine Meets Virtual reality conferences.  He chaired the 2003 ASCE Engineering Mechanics Conference and co-chaired SPM 03, the eighth ACM Symposium on Solid Modeling and Applications. He is a member of ACM and SIAM.