David Alan Drabold (born 13 February 1960) is an American physicist, currently Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor [1] at Ohio University.
Born in Akron, Ohio to Walter Drabold Jr. and Marjorie Jane Ruthenberg. Drabold was raised in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.
Drabold received a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Akron in 1982, and a PhD. in Physics from Washington University in St. Louis under the supervision of Peter Fedders. He was also significantly influenced by E. T. Jaynes. He held term appointments in Physics at the University of Notre Dame, where his key mentor was Otto F. Sankey and both Materials Science and Engineering and Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where his key mentor was Richard M. Martin.
Drabold took a tenure track appointment at Ohio University in 1993. He is a theoretical physicist working primarily in condensed matter physics, materials science, and computational physics with an emphasis on amorphous, paracrystalline and glassy materials, [2] including more than 100 works on the theory of amorphous silicon. He is known for elucidating the consequences of structural or thermal disorder for electronic, optical and transport properties. [3] His published research includes about 300 works, and has received about 12,000 scientific citations, with an h-index of 61 in 2025. [4] He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (in the Division of Materials Physics in 2003), [5] (citation: For fundamental contributions to the physics of non-crystalline materials and development of efficient first-principles electronic structure methods) a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and Fellow of the Royal Numismatic Society. [6] He has mentored 22 Ph.D. students to date. A Festschrift volume was published [7] commemorating his sixtieth birthday.
He has been Visiting Fellow Commoner in Trinity College, Cambridge, [8] and is a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. He was Leverhulme Visiting Professor of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge in 2008. [9]
Origins of structural and electronic transitions in disordered silicon [10]
Signatures of paracrystallinity in amorphous silicon from machine-learning-driven molecular dynamics [11]
Maximum entropy approach for linear scaling in the electronic structure problem [12]
Unconstrained minimization approach for electronic computations that scales linearly with system size [13]
Order-𝑁 projection method for first-principles computations of electronic quantities and Wannier functions [14]
Energetics of Large Fullerenes: Balls, Tubes, and Capsules [15]
Ab Initio Simulation of Amorphous Graphite [16]
Theory of Defects in Semiconductors (with S. K. Estreicher), Springer (2007). [17]