Susan Trolier-McKinstry is the Steward S. Flaschen Professor of Ceramic Science and Engineering, Professor of Electrical Engineering, and Director of the Nanofabrication facility at the Pennsylvania State University.  Her main research interests include thin films for dielectric and piezoelectric applications.  She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Ceramic Society, IEEE, and the Materials Research Society, and an academician of the World Academy of Ceramics. She currently serves as an associate editor for Applied Physics Letters.  She was 2017 President of the Materials Research Society; previously she served as president of the IEEE Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control Society, as well as Keramos.  Twenty-one people that she has advised/co-advised have gone on to take faculty positions around the world.

Professor Trolier-McKinstry’s research interests are centered around structure-processing-property relationships in electroceramics. This includes work on understanding the fundamentals that control the magnitude of the dielectric and piezoelectric responses; the reliability of the materials; the processing science associated with depositing and patterning thin film electroceramics with excellent structural and composition control; and piezoelectric microelectromechanical systems (piezoMEMS).