Dr. Juan de Pablo is the University’s inaugural Executive Vice President for Global Science and Technology, and the Executive Dean of the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. He leads cross-University, multidisciplinary, and globally focused efforts to accelerate the momentum of NYU’s vast science and technology enterprise for the purposes of solving humanity’s largest challenges. Dovetailing with those efforts, de Pablo steers Tandon’s engineering research and education to play a central role in addressing a multitude of areas, from human health, to advances in materials discovery, to the sustainability of the planet.
Before joining NYU, Dr. de Pablo served as the Executive Vice President for Science, Innovation, National Laboratories, and Global Initiatives at the University of Chicago; the Liew Family Professor in Molecular Engineering at Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering; and a Senior Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. Prior to that, he served as the Howard Curler Distinguished Professor and Hilldale Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland.
A prominent materials scientist and chemical engineer, de Pablo’s research focuses on polymers, biological macromolecules such as proteins and DNA, glasses, and liquid crystals. He is a leader in developing molecular models and advanced computational approaches to elucidate complex molecular processes over wide ranges of length and time scales. He has developed advanced algorithms to design and predict the structure and properties of complex fluids and solids at a molecular level, and has been a pioneer in the use of data-driven machine learning approaches for materials design.
Dr. de Pablo is the author or co-author of well over 650 publications and a textbook on Molecular Engineering Thermodynamics. He holds more than 25 patents, one of which has been deemed critical to the semiconductor industry’s miniaturization goals and one of which is now used throughout the world to stabilize proteins and cells, including probiotics, in glassy materials over extended periods of time.
His many honors include the Polymer Physics Prize from the American Physical Society in 2018, the DuPont Medal for Excellence in Nutrition and Health Sciences in 2016, the Intel Patterning Science Award in 2015, and the Charles Stine Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers in 2011.
In 2016, he was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering for the “design of macromolecular products and processes via scientific computation.” In 2022 he was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and is a foreign correspondent member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and the European Academy of Sciences.
Amongst other distinctions, he has delivered the Lacey Lectures at Caltech (2020), the Dodge Lectures at Yale (2018), and the National Science Foundation’s Mathematical and Physical Sciences Lecture (2018). He has chaired the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Advisory Committee of the National Science Foundation and the Committee on Condensed Matter and Materials Research at the National Research Council. He is the founding editor of Molecular Systems Design and Engineering, and served as deputy editor of Sciences Advances and Physical review Letters. He served as the co-director of the NIST Center for Hierarchical Materials Design (CHiMaD) from 2013 to 2024.