Krim to lead college research initiatives

Dr. Jacqueline Krim has been selected to serve as associate dean for research for the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. She had been serving on an interim basis since the retirement last June of Dr. Raymond Fornes after more than 40 years of service to NC State.

As associate dean for research, Krim leads the PAMS Research Office, which promotes research activity across the college and assists faculty and staff in PAMS’ academic departments and research centers to develop and maintain high-quality research programs. The office oversees external funding activities for the college and is responsible for maintaining compliance with the guidelines and policies consistent with university, state and federal requirements.

“Jackie brings to this position exceptional scientific credentials and a deep understanding of the research enterprise,” said PAMS Dean Dan Solomon “As she has demonstrated in ably filling the role for the last year, her extensive experience with research funding sources and processes will be of immense value in carrying out the job.”

Krim received her Ph.D. in experimental condensed matter physics from the University of Washington in 1984. After a year-long appointment as a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) postdoctoral fellow at the University d’Aix-Marseille II, France, she joined the faculty at Northeastern University as an assistant professor.

She came to NC State in 1998 as a full professor of physics, and has subsequently been appointed as an associate member of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

Krim’s research interests include solid-film growth processes and topologies at submicron length scales, nanotribology (the study of friction, wear, and lubrication at nanometer length and time scales) and liquid-film wetting phenomena. Her research accomplishments include the first experimental documentation of phononic mechanisms for sliding friction and the discovery of superconductivity-dependent friction. Other significant accomplishments include demonstrating that van der Waals forces can control the thickness of a wetting layer, important as the only uncontested experiment which demonstrates this common assumption, and applications of scanning probe microscopy to self-affine fractal surfaces, important for their wide applicability.

Krim has served on the editorial boards for Tribology Transactions, Tribology Letters, and on the advisory editorial board for Surface Science. She has published and lectured widely on the topic of the atomic-scale origins of friction, and is the author of numerous invited review articles on this topic. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Vacuum Society and has a long and successful track record with external funding agencies, most notably the National Science Foundation, which has awarded her both a Presidential Young Investigator Award (1986) and an American Competitiveness and Innovation Fellowship (2010) “for outstanding contributions to understanding friction at the nanoscale and exemplary efforts in broadening participation in science through maintaining a diverse research group and explaining research to the lay public.”