Kyriakos Komvopoulos is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, UCB and a Faculty Scientist, Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). He is also the founder and director of the Surface Mechanics and Tribology Laboratory (1989), which in 2008 was split into two laboratories, the Surface Sciences and Engineering Laboratory (SSEL) and the Computational Surface Mechanics Laboratory (CSML), to better accommodate his research programs in different interdisciplinary fields.

Professor Komvopoulos has been in the faculty of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) since 1989. Before joining UCB, he was in the faculty of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1986-1989). Professor Komvopoulos is internationally known for pioneering research in surface nanosciences and nanoengineering, with important implications in several emerging technologies including communications, microelectronics, information storage, and biotechnology.

Professor Komvopoulos’ research has been at the interfaces of mechanical and electrical engineering, materials sciences, surface physics and chemistry, bioengineering, and biology. His work is characterized by a multidisciplinary nature and combines analytical and experimental techniques to analyze complex surface and interface phenomena.

Professor Komvopoulos research is documented in over 235 papers in peer-reviewed archival journals, some 70 publications in refereed conference proceedings, 18 non-refereed symposium-proceedings papers, over 60 technical reports, and 13 US patents (10 awarded and 3 pending). He has also authored an undergraduate-level textbook (Mechanical Testing of Engineering Materials) and co-authored two monographs (Long Term Durability of Structural Materials: Durability 2000 and 1999 Interface Tribology Towards 100 Gbit/in2). He has given more than 210 presentations at international conferences, academic institutions, national laboratories, and various industries, and has supervised the research and dissertations of 51 graduate students (27 PhD and 24 MS) and 15 post-doctoral students, visiting faculty, and industry fellows, and has been a consultant for a wide range of industries and law firms on a variety of litigation matters. Professor Komvopoulos is Fellow of ASME, Fellow of STLE, and recipient of several prestigious awards, including NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award (1989-1996), IBM Faculty Development Award (1990-1992), Berkeley Engineering Fund Award (1989-1990), ASME B. L. Newkirk Award (1988), and NSF Engineering Initiation Award (1987).

At UCB, Professor Komvopoulos teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Mechanical Behavior of Engineering Materials, Plasticity, Fracture, Fatigue, and Tribology and actively participates in the Nanosciences and Nanoengineering Graduate Program of UCB. He is currently the research advisor of 8 PhD students.

“I’ ve been cooperating with the Nanotechnology Department of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki for the past 15 years, and I can surely say that the students and the courses are at the same level with the ones in the States. The only difference is that students in Greece acquire knowledge that noone can make good use of”, says Komvopoulos.