Meet the Dean

John Blondin is interim dean of the College of Sciences, effective January 1, 2023. He had been serving as the college’s senior associate dean for administration, focusing on faculty start-up and retention packages and reappointment, promotion and tenure decisions; facilities coordination; and advancing the strategic priorities of the college. Blondin has also served as associate dean for research and as head of the Department of Physics. 

Blondin is an internationally prominent astrophysicist who joined the NC State faculty in 1993. His research focuses on computational gas dynamics, with applications to interacting binary stars, accretion disks around compact objects, planetary nebulae, supernovae and supernova remnants. He discovered the nonlinear thin-shell instability and the spherical accretion shock instability, the latter of which may aid in driving supernova explosions. He also co-authored the hydrodynamics code VH-1, which is widely used in the astrophysics community. 

His research and teaching honors include the Cottrell Scholar Award, the National Science Foundation Early Career Development Award and NC State’s Outstanding Teacher Award. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Blondin received a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Wisconsin and a master’s degree and doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of Chicago. He also completed postdoctoral research at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Virginia and UNC-Chapel Hill.