Kristen Fichthorn

Kristen A. Fichthorn is an American chemical engineer and condensed matter physicist

whose research involves computational simulation, multiscale modeling, and molecular dynamics of interfaces, thin films, colloids, catalysis, nanostructures, and other material processes. She is the Merrell Fenske Professor of Chemical Engineering and Professor of Physics at Pennsylvania State University.

Education and career
Fichthorn has a 1985 bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, and completed her Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 1989 at the University of Michigan.

After a year of postdoctoral research at the University of California, Santa Barbara, supported by IBM, Fichthorn joined the Pennsylvania State University faculty as an assistant professor in 1990.

Since 1986, Fichthorn has authored or co-authored 292 articles and papers on interfaces and surfaces.

Recognition
Fichthorn was named as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2010, after a nomination from the APS Division of Condensed Matter Physics, "for simulations that revealed new phenomena in the kinetics of reaction systems, self-assembly of nanostructures, and diffusion in mesoporous systems". She became a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers in 2017.

She was the recipient of the 2019 Nanoscale Science and Engineering Forum Award of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and one of two 2020 Langmuir Lecturers of the American Chemistry Society Colloid & Surface Division.