Carolyn Duran

Carolyn Renee Duran is an American materials scientist who is Senior Director of Product Integrity at Apple Inc. She is the former President of the Materials Research Society, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2024.

Early life and education Duran studied materials science and engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. She moved to Northwestern University for her doctoral research, where she studied the structure-property relationships of superconducting thin films grown using metalorganic chemical vapor deposition.

Career Duran joined Intel, where she eventually served as Vice President of Technology Development. She focussed on programs to continue advancing Moore's law. Duran spent 24 years at Intel, where she developed processing techniques for thin films and a program on responsible mineral sourcing. She created new strategies to create interconnects. She found that the semiconducting chips that Intel were creating used materials that had been mined from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She led an effort to eliminate conflict materials from the supply chain, identifying audited, legitimate mines that were not involved with armed rebel militia. In 2016, Intel announced that every product it shipped would be conflict-free. 2022 Elected President of the Materials Research Society 2024 Elected Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering