Kenneth Poeppelmeier

Kenneth Reinhard Poeppelmeier (born 6 October 1949) is the Charles E. & Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University.

Poeppelmeier completed his bachelor's degree in chemistry at the University of Missouri in 1971. From 1971 to 1974 he taught chemistry at Samoa College as part of the Peace Corps.

After returning from Samoa, he enrolled at Iowa State University and, in 1978, was awarded a doctorate for his work on reduced scandium halide compounds completed under the direction of John Corbett. After graduation, he joined Exxon Central Research and Development where he studied novel catalytic materials, the synthesis and properties of transition metal oxygen-deficient perovskites, and zeolites. In 1984, he joined Northwestern University as professor of inorganic chemistry.

In 1989, he co-lead the team that was awarded the Science and Technology Center for Superconductivity (STcS), one of the first research centers organized by the National Science Foundation to provide science and engineering opportunities to address complex research problems that required the advantages of scale, skillsets, longer time duration, and equipment. The Center comprised researchers from Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Argonne National Laboratory. Poeppelmeier was the Centers Associate Director. .From 2010-2020, he held a joint appointment in the Chemical Sciences and Engineering Division at Argonne National Laboratory and served as Deputy Division Director for Science. From 2012-2023, Poeppelmeier represented Northwestern University on the Governors Board, a group established to operate and coordinate the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR), an Office of Science Innovation Hub centered at Argonne National Laboratory. He was a member of the Materials Discovery effort associated with identifying multivalent-based energy storage systems.

His work at Northwestern has focused on the role of materials synthesis, transport properties, and materials design in the isolation of new compounds with applications in superconductivity, nonlinear optical materials, catalysis, and energy storage. From 1995-2015, he was the materials editor for the American Chemical Society journal Inorganic Chemistry.