Yehia Massoud has had significant progressive academic leadership and has been involved in forging and building effective partnerships with numerous academic and industrial institutions, and international organizations, and governmental funding agencies.

He was a Group Leader in the Advanced Technology Group at Synopsys Inc. in Mountain View, CA from 1999 to 2003, where he was awarded the Synopsys Special Recognition Engineering Award. He later joined Rice University in 2003 and became one of the fastest Rice faculty to be granted tenure in the department of Electrical Engineering and the Department of Computer Science in 2007. He was the ECE Department Head at WPI from 2012 to 2017.[2] He strongly advocated for dynamic curricula that combine foundational competencies and knowledge breadth, along with a vibrant innovation mindset. During his five-year term as the department head, the department saw an unprecedented growth in research expenditures, research output, industrial partnerships, undergraduate and graduate student enrollments, unrestricted funds and gifts, and the visibility and recognition of the department, along with a 26-position improvement in the department rankings by U.S. News & World Report.