Dr. Brian Moran joined KAUST in September 2008 as Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Dean of the then Earth and Environmental Sciences and Engineering Division. He was later named Associate Provost for Graduate Affairs. 

He served as Acting Provost from April 2009–July 2010 where he led efforts to recruit top faculty and to develop KAUST's academic infrastructure. He was appointed Dean of Graduate Affairs in August 2010. 

Prior to joining KAUST, Dr. Moran served as chair of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Northwestern University in the United States, where he chaired an advisory board that developed a program in Architectural Engineering and Design. During an earlier stint as Chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department, Dr. Moran established a research thrust in neural engineering while also leading the department through program review and accreditation. 

Dr. Moran, a native of Ireland, earned a Bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering and a Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Galway. He received the National University of Ireland Bursary in Civil Engineering for study abroad and he went to Brown University in the United States where he received a master's of science in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Solid Mechanics. He also spent a year as an IBM Research Fellow at the California Institute of Technology before joining Northwestern in 1988. 

Dr. Moran has published more than 100 technical articles and is co-author of the book Nonlinear Finite Elements for Continua and Structures. He received a best paper award from SPIE, NDE Symposium in 2005. 

His research interests are in multi-scale computational science and engineering, fracture mechanics and plasticity, and the use of novel techniques, such as extended finite element and level set methods, for moving boundary value problems.

Dr. Moran is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He was elected to the board of directors of the Society of Engineering Science and served as secretary of that organization. He co- chaired the Seventh World Congress on Computational Mechanics in Los Angeles in 2006. He received the University of Galway, Alumni Award in Engineering and Informatics in 2010. 

Students elected Dr. Moran to the Northwestern Faculty Honor Roll for Teaching on two separate occasions. He also received the W.M. Keck Foundation Award for Engineering Teaching Excellence.