Dr. Mohammad Dehghani

Dr. Mohammad (Mo) Dehghani became chancellor of Missouri University of Science and Technology in 2019. Under his leadership, the university received a $300 million gift from Fred and June Kummer to establish the Kummer Institute for Student Success, Research and Economic Development and the Kummer College of Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Development. It remains the largest single gift to any university in Missouri. 

His visionary leadership also led to a period of unprecedented expansion at Missouri S&T that continues today, including creating the Arrival District to welcome students and visitors to campus. The district includes the Innovation Lab for students that opened in February 2024 and a Welcome Center that will be completed in 2025. Construction is underway on the Missouri Protoplex, which will create a statewide ecosystem of manufacturing and technology. It will allow industry and academia to come together to advance manufacturing and bring integrated cyber-physical manufacturing systems into practical use.

Dehghani is a nationally prominent research and academic leader who has experience leading complex organizations and building collaborative teams. 

In 2013, he joined Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he served as vice provost for research, innovation and entrepreneurship. At Stevens, he led the university’s continuing development of research programs and implementation of the research and scholarship component of the university’s strategic plan. He also was a member of the board of directors for the Research and Development Council of New Jersey and as chair of the Stevens Venture Center Advisory Board.

Dehghani also served at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a research scientist and later as a group leader of the Engineering Systems Design and Fabrication group. Other roles included the division leader of the New Technologies Division and the director of External Relations with Academia. The laboratory is a $1.8 billion, 7,000-employee multidisciplinary applied science and engineering national security laboratory with programs in advanced defense technologies, energy, environment, biosciences and basic sciences.

At Lawrence Livermore, Dehghani helped develop technologies and expand many areas of engineering, including biomedical engineering, nuclear engineering, process systems and the traditional engineering disciplines of mechanical engineering, electronics, fluidics, and multi-scale modeling and simulations.

Dehghani became a professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University in 2008. He also served as associate director for engineering, design and fabrication in the Applied Physics Laboratory. In 2011, he became the founding director of the Johns Hopkins University Systems Institute. Through that institute, he established collaborative research and application programs with several organizations, including the Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Health and Human Services, with internal divisions at Hopkins, including Johns Hopkins Medicine, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Whiting School of Engineering and the Applied Physics Laboratory.

He is a triple mechanical engineering graduate of Louisiana State University, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1980, a master’s degree in 1982 and a Ph.D. in 1987. His academic career began at Ohio University after completing a postdoctoral NSF internship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Dr. Dehghani is married to Mina (Saffari) Dehghani, a pharmacist. They have one son, Devon, and two pets (a Brittany Spaniel and an orange tabby cat). A licensed pilot, Dr. Dehghani enjoys flying planes. He also enjoys fly-fishing.