Steven J. Sibener, the Carl William Eisendrath Distinguished Service Professor in Chemistry and The James Franck Institute at the University of Chicago, and Fellow of the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, has made seminal contributions to a wide variety of forefront areas of modern chemistry and physics encompassing surface and materials chemistry, nanoscience, chemical physics, gas-surface interactions, catalytic reaction kinetics, polymeric systems, superconducting radiofrequency (SRF) materials, and the chemistry of ice. His contributions have focused on elucidating the atomic-level dynamical properties of interfaces, as well as the chemical processes and physical transformations that occur on such interfaces. Molecular beam scattering, scanning probe microscopy imaging, numerical simulations, and theory all play prominent roles in his research. He is especially proud of the accomplishments achieved by the many outstanding postdoctoral fellows, graduate, undergraduate, and high school students who have participated in his research program.

Amongst his many honors are the Marlow Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Arthur W. Adamson Award for Distinguished Service in the Advancement of Surface Chemistry of the ACS, the American Vacuum Society Prairie Chapter Award for Outstanding Research, the Sibener Festschrift Issue of The Journal of Physical Chemistry, and the ACS Ira Remsen Award. He is a Fellow of five learned societies: the American Chemical Society, American Physical Society, American Vacuum Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), and has been twice elected a Visiting Fellow of the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA).

He has twice served as Director of The James Franck Institute, the NSF Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at UChicago, the multi-university DoD MURI Center for Materials Chemistry in the Space Environment, the multi-university NSF-CCI Center for Energetic Non-Equilibrium Chemistry at Interfaces, and has chaired the Division of Chemical Physics of the APS. He has chaired the two University of Chicago faculty committees that recommended forming the new Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and helped to define its ambitious horizons. He was the inaugural Director of the University of Chicago's Molecular Engineering's Water Research Initiative.

Sibener received his Sc.B. in chemistry and B.A. in physics, both with honors, from the Univ. of Rochester, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in chemistry from the Univ. of California, Berkeley, under the guidance of Nobel Laureate Yuan T. Lee, and accepted appointment to the UChicago faculty while a fourth-year graduate student at Berkeley. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Bell Laboratories.