Professor Wayne D. Kaplan holds the Karl Stoll Chair in Advanced Materials at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa Israel. Kaplan completed his B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering at the Technion in 1989, and his M.Sc. and D.Sc. in Materials Engineering at the Technion (1991, 1994).  After a year as a Humboldt Post-Doctoral fellow at MPI-Stuttgart, Kaplan returned to the Technion in 1995 with a faculty appointment.

Kaplan has published more than 148 manuscripts in reviewed and archived international journals, two textbooks (Joining Processes and Microstructural Characterization of Materials, with D. Brandon), and has presented over 95 invited lectures at international conferences.  Kaplan has been honored with the Taub Award for Academic Excellence, the Technion Prize for Innovativeness and Enterprise (for the development of a method for rapid feasibility analysis between academia and industry), and he is a fellow of the American Ceramic Society.  Kaplan served as an editor of the Journal of Materials Science, Chair of the Israel Society for Microscopy, Chair of the Basic Science Division (BSD) of the American Ceramic Society, Dean at the Technion (2010-2014) and Executive VP for Research of the Technion from 2014-2019. Kaplan sees the BSD as an important conduit to promote fundamental aspects of advanced ceramic science.

Kaplan’s research focuses on fundamental interface science, with a strong emphasis on metal-ceramic interfaces via a combination of interface thermodynamics and advanced electron microscopy.  In recent years he has focused on solute adsorption affecting grain boundary mobility in ceramics.  The results of these fundamental studies are then applied towards metal-ceramic composites and joins.