Professor Curtin earned a 4 yr. ScB/ScM degree in Physics from Brown University in 1981 and a PhD in theoretical physics from Cornell University in 1986.  He worked as staff researcher at British Petroleum until 1993 when he joined Virginia Tech.  In 1998 he returned to Brown as Full Professor in the Solid Mechanics group, and was appointed Elisha Benjamin Andrews Professor in 2006.  He joined Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne as the Director of the Institute of Mechanical Engineering in 2011 and officially as Full Professor in 2012.  He retired from EPFL at the end of 2022 and rejoined Brown as Full Professor in 2023.