Professor Debenedetti is the Class of 1950 Professor in Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University's Chemical Engineering Department. He obtained his B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering from Buenos Aires University, Argentina, in 1978, and M.S. (1981) and Ph.D. (1985) degrees, also in Chemical Engineering, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1978 to 1980 he was Process Development Engineer with O. de Nora, Impianti Elettrochimici, Milan, Italy.

His research interests include the thermodynamics and statistical mechanics of liquids, liquid mixtures and glasses, especially water and aqueous solutions; protein thermodynamics; the stabilization of biomolecules in glassy matrices; nucleation theory; and metastable liquids, especially supercooled liquids. He has written one book, Metastable Liquids. Concepts and Principles (Princeton, 1996), and authored or co-authored more than 160 scientific and technical articles.

He is the recipient of the Presidential Young Investigator (National Science Foundation, 1987) and Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar (1989) awards, a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1991), the Professional Progress Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (1997), and the John M. Prausnitz Award in Applied Chemical Thermodynamics (2001), and the Joel Henry Hildebrand Award in the Theoretical and Experimental Chemistry of Liquids from the America Chemical Society (2008). Metastable Liquids (1996) was named “best scholarly/professional book in Chemistry” by the Association of American Publishers. He has delivered the Robert W. Vaughan Memorial Lecture at the California Institute of Technology (1992), the Stanley W. Katz Memorial Lecture at the City College of the City University of New York (1997), the Kurt Wohl Memorial Lecture at the University of Delaware (1997), the Ashton Cary Lecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology (1998), the Collaboratus Lecture at Rutgers University (2003), the American Institute of Chemical Engineers Area 1a Keynote lecture (2003), the Berkeley Lectures in Chemical Engineering (2003), the Donald L. Katz Lectureship in Chemical Engineering at the University of Michigan (2005), and the Patten Distinguished Lecture at the University of Colorado, Boulder (2006), the Reilly Lectureship in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Notre Dame (2007), the Michael Abbott Lecture at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2007), and the Joe Smith Distinguished Lecture at the University of California, Davis (2007).  In 2000 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.