Katherine T. Faber currently holds the position of Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University.  Educated at Alfred University with a B.S. in Ceramic Engineering (1975), she then went on to the Pennsylvania State University for a M.S. in Ceramic Science (1978) and to the University of California at Berkeley for a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering (1982).  She has held the positions of Invited Summer Employee at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (1975, 76) and Development Associate at the Carborundum Company (1978-79) and Visiting Professor of Materials at the University of California at Santa Barbara (Winter 1996).  Prior to joining the faculty at Northwestern in 1988, she was Assistant and Associate Professor of Ceramic Engineering at the Ohio State University (1982-87).  She served a five-year term as Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research in the McCormick School (1992-97) and as department chair (1998-2003). 

 Among Professor Faber's awards are the National Science Foundation's Presidential Young Investigator Award (1984) and Faculty Award for Women in Science and Engineering (1991).  She received the IBM Corporation Faculty Development Award in 1984.  She was named an Alumni Fellow at Alfred University in 1988, a Fellow of the American Ceramic Society in 1990, and a Centennial Fellow of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences at the Pennsylvania State University in 1996 and was elected to the Academy of Ceramics the same year.  Her teaching honors include the Charles E. MacQuigg Award for Outstanding Teaching in the College of Engineering at Ohio State (1985), the American Society for Engineering Educa-tion AT&T Foundation Award (1986), the Society for Automotive Engineers Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award (1989), the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science Faculty Teaching Honor Roll (1990), the Department of Materials Science and Engineering Teacher of the Year (1992), the Society of Women Engineers Distinguished Educator Award (1995), and the YWCA Achievement Award for Education (1997). Most recently she received an NSF Creativity Extension Award (2001-03), was elected a fellow of ASM International (2003) and received the Charles L. Hosler Alumni Scholar Medal from The Pennsylvania State University (2005).

Professor Faber is a member of the American Ceramic Society where she has held numerous positions including Vice President (1992-93, 1994-95) and is currently President.  She served as Chair of the University Materials Council in 2001-2002.  She also holds memberships in the Ceramic Education Council, Sigma Xi, the National Institute of Ceramic Engineers, the American Society of Engineering Education, ASM International, and the Society of Women Engineers. She served on the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Lab from 2005 to 2007. She was one of the founding members and President of the Student Section of the Society of Women Engineers at Alfred University in 1975. Professor Faber's research interests include fracture of brittle materials, thermal shock, fatigue, and reliability.  She has published more than 120 papers and edited one book in the area of fracture and toughening mechanisms in ceramics, glasses, electronic materials, cement-based materials, and ceramic-matrix composites, and has been recognized as an ISI Highly Cited Author. Recently, she established a university-wide collaborative program in conservation science with the Art Institute of Chicago with support from the Mellon Foundation. Her teaching interests lie primarily in mechanical behavior of solids and in statistical process design.