Bernard Kippelen, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), has been named as a Joseph M. Pettit Professor, effective September 1. This title was previously held by Mark G. Allen, who remains an ECE adjunct faculty member after accepting a research leadership post at the University of Pennsylvania.

A member of the ECE faculty since 2003, Kippelen conducts research ranging from the investigation of fundamental physical processes to the design, fabrication, and testing of lightweight flexible optoelectronic devices and circuits based on nanostructured organic materials.

Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Kippelen was on the faculty of the University of Arizona Optical Sciences Center from 1994-2003 and was a senior research lecturer with the French National Centre for Scientific Research from 1990-1994. He currently serves as the director of the Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics at Georgia Tech and is the associate director of CIS:HSEM, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

During his academic career, Kippelen has graduated 11 Ph.D. students and five master's students. He has also mentored a large number of undergraduate researchers, including 20 students at Tech, and 20 postdoctoral fellows. Kippelen is the co-author of 235 refereed publications and 12 book chapters, and he holds 15 patents. He is the president of the Lafayette Institute, a major optoelectronics commercialization initiative that is based at Georgia Tech-Lorraine in Metz, France. 

The research findings of Kippelen and his team have been the focus of many technical and popular press articles, with the most recent featuring the development of solar cells made from plants and trees. He is a Fellow of SPIE and OSA, a senior member of IEEE, and a member of the American Chemical Society, American Physical Society, and Materials Research Society.