Kristen Fichthorn

Kristen Fichthorn is the Merrell Fenske Professor of Chemical Engineering and a Professor of Physics at the Pennsylvania State University. She received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985 and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1989. She spent one year as an IBM Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of California at Santa Barbara before joining the Department of Chemical Engineering at Penn State as an Assistant Professor in 1990. She has been at Penn State since 1990, taking a break from 1998 to 1999 for a sabbatical leave at the Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft in Berlin, Germany.

Professor Fichthorn’s research is primarily in atomic-scale simulation of fluid-solid interfaces, with a diverse array of applications in thin-film and crystal growth, colloidal assembly and stability, catalysis at surfaces, wetting and spreading, lubrication, and separations. An area of emphasis is developing new methods to accurately include atomic-scale details in computer simulations that can reach large length scales and/or long time scales. She has authored more than 130 papers on these topics. In addition to being recognized by Penn State for her outstanding research and teaching, she is the recipient of the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award (1990), an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship (1998), and she is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2011).