Pawel Keblinski, Ph.D., has been named John Tod Horton ’52 Professor of Materials Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. An endowed chaired professorship is among the highest honors bestowed on a Rensselaer faculty member.

Keblinski is the head of the RPI Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He uses molecular simulations to investigate interfacial materials with applications to energy transport, nanotechnology, and integrated electronics. He is also a member of the Center for Materials, Devices, and Integrated Systems (CMDIS) and the Center for Computational Innovations.

Keblinski has published more than 200 journal papers and made numerous invited and keynote presentations. His research is published in some of the most prestigious journals, including Physical Review Letters, Science, Nature Materials, Applied Physics Letters, PNAS, and others. According to Google Scholar, Keblinski’s work is cited over 30,000 times with an H-index of 75, numbers that place him among the top faculty members at RPI.

Keblinski’s contributions to the field of materials engineering have been recognized with several awards. He was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow (1996), an elected fellow of the American Physical Society (2014), a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow (2017), and an elected fellow of the Materials Research Society (2020). He has received three School of Engineering Awards for Excellence in Research, the first in 2004 (junior category), the second in 2010 (senior category), and third in 2013 as a member of the Outstanding Research Team.

Keblinski received his master’s degree from Warsaw University in 1990 and Ph.D. from Penn State University in 1995, both in physics. Before joining RPI in 1999, Keblinski was a postdoctoral fellow at Argonne National Laboratory and worked at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe in Germany.