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 and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan. She spent one year as an IBM Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California at Santa Barbara before joining Penn State. Professor Fichthorn’s research is in multi-scale materials simulation. She develops and applies theoretical techniques ranging from quantum density functional theory to molecular dynamics, Monte Carlo methods, and continuum theories to a diverse array of fundamental problems involving fluid-solid interfaces. She received the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award (1990), an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship (1998), an APS Fellow (2011), an AIChE Fellow (2017), a recipient of the AIChE Nanoscale Science and Engineering Forum Award (2019), and a recipient of the Langmuir Lectureship of the ACS (2020).