Interim Director of Sales and Development

Dr. Leticia Velazquez is currently the Interim Director of Sales and Development for the Tapia Center at Rice University. In this role, she oversees sales initiatives, manages corporate and individual relationships and donations, and provides operational support. With more than 25 years of experience in higher education, Dr. Velazquez has held positions as a Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences and as the Director of the Computational Science Program at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). Her research focuses on large-scale nonlinear programming algorithms aimed at improving decision-making accuracy. Dr. Velazquez earned her Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from UTEP. She received a GEM Fellowship for her Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Rice University and completed her Ph.D. in Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice, where she was supervised by Drs. Richard Tapia and Yin Zhang. Following her doctorate, she was awarded a DOE-Sloan Fellowship for postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School and MIT. Dedicated to mentoring and collaboration, Dr. Velazquez has co-authored several research papers with students and colleagues from various institutions, including Stanford University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Arizona State University. In 2025, she and 12 co-authors received the Publication of Enduring Quality Award from the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association for their paper titled "Adaptive Human Behavior in Epidemiological Models," published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.