Vincent Meunier

Vincent Meunier is a Belgian/American condensed matter and materials physicist known for his theoretical and computational research on electronic, optoelectronic, and structural properties of low-dimensional materials. He is the Department Head and P. B. Breneman Chair and Professor in the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics at Pennsylvania State University. Among his contributions are the quantum mechanical description of processes responsible for scanning tunneling image formation in low-dimensional materials, the development of a microscopic theory of nanocapacitors, and contributions to the theory of electronic transport and ultra-low frequency vibrational modes in van der Waals heterostructures. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), of the Institute of Physics (IOP), and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Open Access Elsevier journal Carbon Trends.

Education and early career
Meunier completed his high-school training in the Institut Saint-Michel in Neufchateau, Belgium in 1992. While studying at UNamur, in Namur (Belgium) he earned a B.Sc. in Physics (1996) and a M.Sc. in Physics and Chemistry of Mesoscopic Systems (1998). He then completed a Ph.D. in Physics (maxima cum laude) in 1999 as a Research Fellow supported by a FRIA scholarship from the National Fund for Scientific Research of Belgium.

Early January 2000, Meunier became a post-doctoral Fellow (2000–2002) at the Physics Department of the North Carolina State University under Jerry Bernholc and Christopher Roland, and later a research associate (2002–2004) with the Computer Science and Mathematics Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory under the supervision of Thomas Zacharia. In April 2004, he became a R&D Staff member at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and was among the inaugural staff of the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (2005) at Oak Ridge where he was appointed as Senior R&D Staff member in 2009.

Later career and current positions
In 2010, Meunier accepted a Chaired Associate Professor (with tenure) appointment with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York. By doing so, Meunier completed the Gail and Jeffrey L. Kodosky ’70 Constellation following Shengbai Zhang's appointment in 2008.

In January 2015, Meunier was appointed as Full Professor of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy and in July 2015 he succeeded to Angel Garcia as the head of the Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with an appointment renewed in 2018 (3 years) and in 2021 (3 years). He resigned from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in June 2022 and was succeeded by Gyorgy Korniss as new head of department.

In July 2022, Meunier joined Pennsylvania State University as Department Head and P. B. Breneman Chair and Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics in the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics. <!--== Honors and awards == 2019: Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

2019: International Francqui Professor, Francqui Foundation

2018: Clarivate Most Highly Cited Researcher

2015: Fellow, Institute of Physics

2011: Fellow, American Physical Society - Division of Computational Physics (DCOMP)

2010: Rensselaer Constellation Chair Medal

2007: Oak Ridge National Laboratory Early Career Award for scientific accomplishments.

Educational activities
Meunier's teaching focuses on computational and quantum physics education. He developed a Computational Physics curriculum at the senior undergraduate level and taught that course from 2010 to 2015. Since 2010, he also teaches advanced courses such as Introduction to Density Functional Theory and Advanced Computational Physics at the graduate level. He also teaches Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics and Theoretical Mechanics.

Research activities
At Penn State, Meunier leads the Innovative Computational Material Physics (ICMP) group where he performs research in low-dimensional materials and domains where he collaboratively works with engineers and experimentalists to optimize these materials, starting at the atomic level and targeting functionality. He has contributed on an array of computational materials science topics including electronic transport, vibrational properties, energy storage in supercapacitors, the physics of reduced dimensional materials such as carbon nanotubes and nanoribbons, and two-dimensional materials. --> <!-- Notable publications: Early in his career, Meunier developed a theory of Scanning Tunneling Microscopy of carbon nanotubes. . During his stay at North Carolina State University, he developed a quantum mechanical understanding of Li diffusion in one-dimensional nanostructures for battery applications. His early work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was devoted to the study of electronic transport in nanostructures, before focusing on work on the theory of supercapacitive storage in nanoconfined structures in collaboration with Bobby G. Sumpter at ORNL and Pulickel Ajayan at Rice University . At RPI, his contributions include the quantum mechanical study of low-dimensional structures (in collaboration with Millie Dresselhaus) , low-frequency phonons in layered materials , and the investigation of atomically precise one-dimensional nanostructures with emerging quantum states, in collaboration with Roman Fasel at EMPA, Zurich. -->