Wayne D. Kaplan is the Vice President for External Relations and Resource Development of the Technion. He is a Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Technion, where he holds the Karl Stoll Chair in Advanced Materials. He completed his B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering, and his M.Sc. and D.Sc. in Materials at the Technion after immigrating to Israel from the U.S. He then spent a year as a Humboldt Fellow at the Max-Planck Institute in Stuttgart Germany before joining the Technion faculty in 1995.
Since 1995, Prof. Kaplan’s research activities at the Technion have focused on the structure, chemistry and energy of interfaces, primarily between metals and ceramics. Fundamental aspects of the thermodynamics and atomistics of solute adsorption are explored. Applications from these fundamental studies include the development of metal-ceramic composites, flash memory devices, and wear resistant materials. In addition to his fundamental research in materials engineering, Prof. Kaplan works on the development of electron microscopy techniques for characterization at the nano-scale level. Prof. Kaplan, whose research aims at understanding how the arrangement of atoms at metal-ceramic interfaces influences the material’s properties, makes intensive use of the Technion’s monochromated and aberration corrected high resolution transmission electron microscope.
Prof. Kaplan is the author of over 150 scientific articles in reviewed and archived journals, including 4 publications in Science, as well as two textbooks: Joining Processes and Microstructural Characterization of Materials, both published by Wiley. He has advised 48 graduate students for an MSc or PhD. In 2006 he received the Henry Taub Prize for Academic Excellence. He is a fellow of the American Ceramic Society, a member and past chair of the Israel Microscopy Society, was an editor of the Journal of Materials Science (Springer) and is on the Editorial Board of the journal Annual Reviews of Materials Research. In 2021 he received the Sosman Award from the American Ceramic Society.
Kaplan has served in several administration roles at the Technion, including Dean of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (2010-2014), Executive Vice President for Research of the Technion (2014-2019), and Pro Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs of the Guangdong-Technion Israel Institute of Technology (2021-2022), before returning to Technion management as VP for External Relations and Resource Development (October 2022 through present).