Juan de Pablo has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for his distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. de Pablo is the executive vice president for national laboratories, science strategy, innovation, and global initiatives for the University of Chicago; Liew Family Professor of Molecular Engineering at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering; and senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory.
de Pablo’s work entails conducting supercomputer simulations to understand and design new materials from scratch and find applications for them. He is a leader in simulations of polymeric materials, including DNA dynamics—how DNA molecules arrange and organize themselves and interact with other DNA molecules. He also studies protein aggregation and its poorly understood relationship to various diseases, including type II diabetes and neurodegenerative disorders.
He also is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Physical Society. In recent years, Juan has served as chair of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Advisory Committee of the National Science Foundation and the Committee on Condensed Matter and Materials Research at the National Research Council. De Pablo is the founding editor of Molecular Systems Design and Engineering and co-director of the Center for Hierarchical Materials Design. He holds more than 20 patents on multiple technologies, including nine jointly with Prof. Paul Nealey and others, and is the author or co-author of more than 600 publications.
PME currently has five faculty who are NAS members – de Pablo makes six.
de Pablo is one of five University of Chicago faculty members elected to the academy in 2022, joining Joshua A. Frieman, Young-Kee Kim, Susan Stokes, and Andrei Tokmakoff.