Bernard Kippelen is the Vice Provost for International Initiatives and the Steven A. Denning Chair for Global Engagement. He is a Joseph M. Pettit professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Kippelen joined Georgia Tech in 2003 as a member of the faculty. From 2011-2019 he served as Director of the Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics on the Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta. He is a co-founder and co-President of the Institut Lafayette, an innovation platform located on Georgia Tech’s European site Georgia Tech-Europe, formerly known as Georgia Tech-Lorraine (Metz, France).
He was raised in Soultz, Alsace, France, and is a US and French citizen. He studied at the University Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France (PhD 1990) and a member of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). Before joining Georgia Tech, he was on the faculty of the Optical Sciences Center at the University of Arizona.
His research contributions are in the field of organic optoelectronics. He holds 26 patents and has co-authored over 700 scientific communications, including over 300 peer-reviewed journal publications and 14 book chapters. His work has received over 30,000 citations and his h-index is 93 (Google Scholar, 2025).
Kippelen is the recipient of an NSF-Career Award (2000), a 3M Corporation Young Faculty Award (2000), a FlexTech Alliance Award (2012), a Printed Electronics USA Award (2012), the Georgia Tech Class of 1934 Outstanding Interdisciplinary Activity Award (2014), and the Georgia Tech Steven A. Denning Faculty Award for Global Engagement (2019). His research was featured in numerous media outlets, including Forbes and Reuters. He was elected a Fellow of the Optical Society of America (2006), a Fellow of SPIE (2007), and he was bestowed the title of Knight of the French National Order of Merit by President Macron (2023). He served as a Deputy Editor for Optics Express (2009-2012) and was the founding Editor of Energy Express (2010-2012).