Kathleen J. Stebe is the Goodwin Professor in the School Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Educated at the City College of New York, she received a B.A. in Economics and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at the Levich Institute advised by Charles Maldarelli. After a post-doctoral year in Compiegne, France under the guidance of Dominique Barthes-Biesel, she joined the Department of Chemical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, where she became Professor and served as the department chair. Thereafter, she joined the University of Pennsylvania, where she served in various administrative capacities including department chair and Deputy Dean. She has been recognized by the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars, and as a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the Radcliffe Institute. Her research focuses on directed assembly in soft matter and at fluid interfaces, with an emphasis on confinement, geometry, and emergent structures in far from equilibrium settings for novel functional materials.