The Department of Chemistry Welcomes Dr. Brenda Rubenstein to the Faculty

February 15, 2016

The department is pleased to welcome Dr. Brenda Rubenstein (AB/ScB ‘07), who will join the faculty as Assistant Professor of Chemistry on July 1, 2016.

Dr. Rubenstein is a New York City native who first came to Brown as an undergraduate. Although a lifelong lover of history and anthropology, she concentrated in Chemical Physics and Applied Mathematics, earning her respective Sc.B. and A.B. in 2007. Upon graduating, she moved to the University of Cambridge, where she completed her M.Phil. in Theoretical Chemistry in 2008 as a Winston Churchill Fellow. Longing for some ‘actual’ food, she subsequently returned to the States to pursue her Ph.D. in Chemical Physics at Columbia University. Since finishing her Ph.D. in 2013, she has been the Lawrence Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, CA. Her research interests are diverse - she has worked extensively on problems in biophysics, traditional statistical mechanics, and condensed matter physics. While at Brown, she will develop and apply new electronic structure methods to a variety of theoretical and experimental problems.

Aside from her research, Dr. Rubenstein is committed to working on issues related to educational inequality and police/prosecutorial overreach into poor and minority communities. Dr. Rubenstein is an avid hiker and cyclist, and may typically be found either outdoors or in the gym when she is not at her desk. She also devotes more of her brain to professional basketball and rap than she should ever admit.