Karin Rabe is a computational materials physicist with a particular interest in the use of first-principles quantum-mechanical calculations for integrated experimental-theoretical design of new functional materials. These include systems at or near structural, electronic and magnetic phase transitions, including ferroelectrics, antiferroelectrics, piezoelectrics, high-k dielectrics, multiferroics, and switchable conductors.
Karin graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in New York City and majored in physics at Princeton University. She received a Ph.D. in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with thesis supervisor John Joannopoulos. After postdoctoral work in the theory department at AT&T Bell Laboratories, she joined the faculty at Yale University, and then in 2000 moved to Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, where she is a Board of Governors Professor of Physics.
Karin is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science and the National Academy of Sciences, and a recipient of the David Adler Lectureship Award in the Field of Materials Physics from the American Physical Society. She has served as president and chair of the board of trustees of the Aspen Center for Physics.
