Pablo Gaston Debenedetti

Dean for Research, Class of 1950 Professor in Engineering and Applied Science, and Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering. Advanced fundamental understanding of metastable liquids and glasses, especially water, bringing this field into the mainstream of chemical engineering. Using computer simulations and statistical mechanics, eludcidated relationship between dynamics and energy landscapes in glass-forming liquids, and between structural order and supercooled water's anomalies. Used advanced free energy computational techniques to prove the existence of a metastable liquid-liquid transition in a molecular model of water. Current research interests include low-temperature behavior of proteins, physical mechanisms for the origin of biological homochirality, ice nucleation at atmospherically-relevant conditions, and molecular-scale drying phenomena.