Romain Murenzi is the executive director of TWAS, the academy of sciences for the developing world, in Trieste, Italy. Murenzi was born in Rwanda and raised in Burundi. After graduating from the National University of Burundi in 1982, he taught mathematics in high school for three years before being awarded a fellowship for doctoral studies from the Catholic University of Louvain, where he earned his doctorate degree in physics in 1990. Murenzi subsequently became a postdoctorate researcher at the Center for Research and Advanced Training in Scientific Computation in Toulouse, France, and a professor of physics at Clark Atlanta University in the United States. Between 2001 and 2009, he served as the minister of science and technology in Rwanda. He returned to the United States in 2009 to assume a joint appointment as director of the Center for Science, Technology, and Sustainable Development at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, DC, and visiting professor at the University of Maryland's Institute of Advanced Computer Studies in College Park, Maryland. He was appointed executive director of TWAS in April 2011. Murenzi is member of the following boards:  the Global Research Council (GRC), the Global Viral Network (GVN), and the Sustainable Development Solution Network (SDSN). Murenzi's major areas of research include multidimensional continuous wavelet transforms to quantum mechanics, image and video processing, and science and technology policy.