Ivan Georgiev Petrov

In 2014 he was elected as president of the American Vacuum Society for 2015.

He was elected Chair of the Surface Engineering Division of the International Union for Vacuum Science, Technique and Applications, serving terms from 2007 to 2022.

Between 2000 and 2012 Petrov was an honorary visiting professor of Surface Engineering at the Materials and Engineering Research Institute of Sheffield Hallam University in England. Since 2010 he is an adjunct professor in the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology (IFM) at Linköping University in Sweden, where he was awarded an honoris causa degree in 2009.

Petrov was one of the principal investigators of the Transmission Electron Aberration-Corrected Microscope (TEAM) project from 2000 to 2009.

In 1989 he moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in collaboration with professor J. E. Greene, serving initially as a visiting professor. From 1998 until 2010, he was an adjunct professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, simultaneously serving as the director of the Center for Microanalysis of Materials at the Seitz Materials Research Laboratory (MRL). From 1998 to the present, he is a principal research scientist at the MRL.

Ivan Georgiev Petrov (Bulgarian: Иван Георгиев Петров) (born 6 September 1949) is a Bulgarian-American physicist, specializing in thin films, surface science, and methods of characterization of materials. His research and scientific contributions have been described as having an "enormous impact on the hard-coatings community". Petrov was the president of the American Vacuum Society for 2015.

Ivan Petrov was born in 1949 in Shumen, Bulgaria. For high school, he attended the English Language School Geo Milev in Ruse, graduating in 1968. He studied physics at Sofia University where he earned a MSc in 1974. He earned his PhD in Physics from the Institute of Electronics at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in 1986, after which he became an associate professor until 1989.