Juan de Pablo Appointed Executive Dean of NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering and First Executive VP for Global Science and Tech

NYU President Linda G. Mills and Provost Georgina Dopico today announced the appointment of Juan de Pablo—a distinguished materials scientist, chaired professor, and executive vice president at the University of Chicago—as executive dean of NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering and the University’s inaugural executive vice president for global science and tech. He will assume his duties on October 1, 2024.

Since 2014, NYU has advanced from 38th on the National Science Foundation’s research and development ranking of American universities to 15th currently (and #1 in New York City).

President Mills said, “Making NYU the premier institution for global discovery, innovation, and entrepreneurship has been one of the four strategic pathways that has guided our vision for the past year. Today, we are announcing a major step in realizing that vision: the appointment of Juan de Pablo—an esteemed scholar and extraordinary leader in science—as our inaugural executive vice president for global science and technology and executive dean of NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering.

“In his role as the newly created executive vice president he will lead a cross-University, globally focused effort designed to accelerate the momentum of NYU’s vast science and technology enterprise. Central to that effort will be his work as executive dean of the Tandon School of Engineering, which has a long and remarkable history dating back nearly 200 years. Since restoring engineering to NYU 10 years ago, both the school and the University have thrived, including significant growth in research funding, new opportunities for collaboration, and translational developments.

“In Juan we have found a person perfectly suited to fill both roles and to lead us into what promises to be a science and technology revolution on the cusp of our University’s third century. We warmly welcome him to NYU.”

Juan de Pablo’s research interests focus on the study of complex materials systems, including polymers, biological macromolecules, and liquid crystals; on developing molecular models and computer simulations of complex molecular processes over wide ranges of length and time scales; and on the use of data-driven machine learning approaches for materials design, among other related areas. He has authored or co-authored over 650 publications and holds more than two dozen patents.

He is currently the Liew Family Professor of Molecular Engineering and executive vice president for science, innovation, national laboratories, and global initiatives at the University of Chicago; and senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. He brings to NYU a nationally recognized record of leading far-reaching, strategic science initiatives; experience in working across disciplines, schools, and national laboratories to advance science in cross-cutting and innovative ways; a keen understanding of how NYU’s unique global presence can be used to advantage our faculty’s research; and his own distinguished record of scholarly accomplishment. He first joined the University of Chicago in 2012 as a faculty member in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, and has been deeply involved in the school’s development. Previously, he was the Curler Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Professor de Pablo is the recipient of numerous honors. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Mexican Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. He is also the recipient of the Polymer Physics Prize from the American Physical Society (2018), the DuPont Medal for Excellence in Nutrition and Health Sciences (2016), the Intel Patterning Science Award (2015), and the Charles Stine Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (2011), among other distinctions.

He received his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and his PhD in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. He conducted postdoctoral research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich.