When David Leebron became the seventh president of Rice University in 2004, the prestigious private school had an international student body of less than 3 percent. In the past decade, that number has increased to 12 percent, with Chinese students making up half.

Leebron has made Rice “more influential and more powerful in the world”, said Bobby Tudor, board chairman at Rice.

Leebron was honored with the Huffington Award by the Asia Society Texas Center on Wednesday. Former award recipients include President George H.W. Bush and First Lady Barbara Bush and Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore.

During a luncheon attended by more than 400s, Leebron shared his ideas and visions in a conversation with Douglas Foshee, CEO of Sallyport Investment.

Leebron said that when he first arrived in Houston, he found that Rice lacked connections with Latin American and Asian countries, and he went about chaning that.

Now Rice has a host of collaboration programs with universities in Latin America and Asia. It has established a joint degree program with Brazil and is in discussion with universities in China about similar possibilities.

Leebron said it’s not just about recruiting international students, it’s also about engagement, content and perspective.

Many issues such as food, energy, technology and global warming are connected. “Solutions to those issues will be quicker to be found if we use talent from around the world,” Leebron said.

“We are putting leaders around the world,” he said. “Some international students will stay here to make considerable contributions to the US. Those who go back to their own countries will know about the US people and culture and understand us at a very deep level. That’s advantageous to the US.”

Recently back from a trip to China, Leebron said that at Peking University, which he and his wife Y. Ping Sun visited, about 80 percent of the faculty there have gotten degrees from US schools.

“We want that to be true 20 years from now,” said Leebron, who calls for the US to put more resources in public higher education and offer more scholarship to international students.