Anatoly Frenkel Named Weston Visiting Professor at Weizmann Institute of Science

Prof. Anatoly Frenkel, of the  College of Engineering and Applied Sciences ,  with a Joint Appointment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s   Brookhaven National Laboratory, has been named Weston Visiting Professor in the Department of Materials and Interfaces at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.

He will be hosted by Dr. Igor Lubomirsky, professor at Weizmann, who has been Frenkel’s collaborator for more than 15 years. Together, Frenkel and Lubomirsky seek to understand how important materials used in advanced technological applications—as diverse as fuel cells, audio speakers, sonar detectors and portable cameras—function. Their work focuses in particular on materials that develop high levels of mechanical stress in response to electric fields.

“The Weizmann Institute is a unique institution that attracts top talent and is the home base of three Nobel Prize-winning researchers,” said Frenkel. “Over the years, I have collaborated with ten Weizmann researchers and coauthored over 20 articles with them, hence my long-term interest and respect. With the travel support that will be available to me through this fellowship, I will be able to visit Professor Lubomirsky  and other colleagues at the Weizmann Institute for two to three weeks every year, discuss results obtained in joint experiments–some of which are currently under way–and plan future work.”

Professor Frenkel joined the Stony Brook faculty in 2016 after working at Yeshiva University. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle; earned his PhD in Physics at Tel Aviv University, Israel; and his M.Sc. at St. Petersburg University, Russia. He leads the Structure and Dynamics of Applied Nanomaterials research group at Brookhaven National Lab,