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 and glass transition 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 he is also a faculty member in the Physics Department. In Kiel, he extended his research inter alia 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 European Initiative Nanotechnology and a founding member of the newly established International Alliance of Societies for a Sustainable Future,  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 the Springer Nature journal Discover Applied Sciences. In the past, among other journals, he served on the editorial boards of Applied Physics Letters, Journal of Applied Physics, and Journal of Adhesion Science and Technology. 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 420 papers. He has an h-index of 69 and more than 195000 citations (Google scholar 12/2024).