Elie Bou-Zeid is Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University, where he also served as the founding director of the Metropolis Initiative for urban technology until 2022. His research focuses on the integration of theory, numerical simulations, and experimental observations to study flow and transport in the lowest kilometer of the atmosphere, where humans live and have a direct impact on the planet. In particular, he is interested in applications related to the built environment and cities, solar and wind energy, and heterogenous terrain. 

He is the recipient of the 2024 ‘STAC - Distinguished Scientific/Technological Accomplishment Award’, from the Board on the Urban Environment of the American Meteorological Society; and of the ‘Beyond Bauhaus - Prototyping the Future Award’ for his CityReader Project on mobile urban sensing. He is the current chair of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Boundary Layer and Turbulence, and served as editor of the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences from 2020 till 2025.

Bou-Zeid holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering and a Master’s degree in Environmental and Water Resources Engineering from the American University of Beirut, and a Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University. Before joining Princeton, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), where he received the Prize of the “Fondation Latsis Internationale” for best research work by a Postdoc or a Ph.D. student across all fields at EPFL.