Franz Faupel was born in Fritzlar, Germany, in 1957. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Göttingen in 1985, working on diffusion in alloys. In 1987, he joined the IBM Th. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, as a postdoctoral fellow studying mechanical properties of metal-polymer structures as well as diffusion and solid-state reactions in thin films. In 1988, he returned to the University of Göttingen where his research focused on diffusion in metallic glasses and other amorphous media, metal-polymer interfaces, and thermodynamics of high-temperature superconductors. Since 1994, Faupel has been a full professor and held the Chair for Multicomponent Materials within the Faculty of Materials Science and Engineering at Kiel University where hass forming metallic melts, positron annihilation spectroscopy of defects in non-crystalline materials, and more recente is also a faculty member in the Physics Department. In Kiel, he extended his research inter alia to diffusion and glass transition in glly to functional nanocomposites and organic thin films, plasma nanoscience, plasmonics, magnetoelectric sensors, photocatalysis, and memristive devices for bioinspired neuromorphic circuits. Faupel is Chairman of the North German Initiative Nanotechnology, Editor of the encyclopedia RÖMPP Online, and Principal Editor of the Journal of Materials Research. He also serves on the editorial boards of Materials and SN Applied Sciences  and served on the editorial boards of Applied Physics Letters, Journal of Applied Physics, Journal of Adhesion Science and Technology and other journals. His past activities also include the chairmanship of the Metal Physics division of the German Physical Society (DPG), the chairmanship of the joint Working Group Metal Physics (AG Metallphysik) of the DPG, the German Materials Research Society (DGM) and the German Society for Metallurgy (VdEH), membership of the  advisory board of the German Materials Research Society (DGM), and membership of the Minerva-Weizmann Committee of the Max Planck Society. Faupel also served as Dean of the Faculty of Materials Science and Engineering for two years and as Vice Dean for four years. In 2014, he was a visiting professor at Kobe University, Japan. Faupel has published more than 400 papers. He has an h-index of 66 and more than 17600 citations (Google scholar 01/2024).