Dr. Steve Greenbaum is a Professor of Physics at Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY) and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He also served (2008-14) as Executive Officer of the Ph.D. Program in Physics at the CUNY Graduate Center. Dr. Greenbaum earned his Ph.D. in Experimental Condensed Matter Physics from Brown University and his undergraduate degree in physics from Clark University. He was an NRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Semiconductor Branch of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., and also spent sabbatical years as a Fulbright Scholar at the Weizmann Institute of Science, and a NASA/NRC Senior Research Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Lab, California Institute of Technology. He has held Visiting Professorships in the Chemistry Department at Stony Brook University, the Materials Science and Engineering Department at Rutgers University, the School of Chemistry at Tel Aviv University, the Laboratory for Solid State Physics of the University of Paris-Sud (XI), the School of Chemical Sciences at University of Padova, and the Department of Chemistry at University of Rome, La Sapienza. Dr. Greenbaum’s research involves spectroscopic studies of disordered solids by magnetic resonance and synchrotron x-ray absorption, most recently on materials for electrochemical energy storage and conversion (i.e. batteries and fuel cells). He works closely with the leading battery materials development groups at DoE and DoD national labs and at universities abroad. His laboratory develops and applies spectroscopic tools to better understand electrochemical storage and failure mechanisms at the atomic level. Dr. Greenbaum was the 2001 recipient of the Roosevelt Gold Medal for Science, bestowed by the New York Council of the United States Navy League, and the 2002 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring, awarded jointly by the National Science Foundation and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He also received the 2003 Richard Nicholson Science Teaching Award.


State Department Profile

Office of Commercial and Business Affairs
Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs

Steve Greenbaum serves as senior science advisor in EB/CBA, which houses the Global Entrepreneurship Program. Among his responsibilities is coordinating a two-day pilot course for Foreign Service Officers on how to work with their host government and Department of State partners to build and foster a culture of entrepreneurship when they go back to their posts. One of Steve’s other priorities is to assemble networks of U.S.-based mentors to assist inventors and entrepreneurs in the developing world, and he had an opportunity to meet many entrepreneurs at the 2014 Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Marrakech, Morocco. Steve also contributed to the formation and staffing of the technical working groups for the recently launched Poland – U.S. Innovation Program, a bilateral framework for investment in defense, health, and energy, through his scientific contacts at the Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Energy.