THEODORE L. BROWN received his Ph.D. from Michigan State University in 1956. Since then, he has been a member of the faculty of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he is now Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus. He served as Vice Chancellor for Research, and Dean, The Graduate College, from 1980 to 1986, and as Founding Director of the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology from 1987 to 1993. Professor Brown has been an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1972 he was awarded the American Chemical Society Award for Research in Inorganic Chemistry, and received the American Chemical Society Award for Distinguished Service in the Advancement of Inorganic Chemistry in 1993. He has been elected a Fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

H. EUGENE LEMAY, JR., received his B.S. degree in Chemistry from Pacific Lutheran University
(Washington) and his Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1966 from the University of Illinois (Urbana). He then joined the faculty of the University of Nevada, Reno, where he is currently Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus. He has enjoyed Visiting Professorships at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, at the University College of Wales in Great Britain, and at the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor LeMay is a popular and effective teacher, who has taught thousands of students during more than 35 years of university teaching. Known for the clarity of his lectures and his sense of humor, he has received several teaching awards, including the University Distinguished Teacher of the Year Award (1991) and the first Regents’ Teaching Award given by the State of Nevada Board of Regents (1997).

BRUCE E. BURSTEN received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin in 1978. After two years as a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Texas A&M University, he joined the faculty of The Ohio State University, where he rose to the rank of Distinguished University Professor. In 2005, he moved to his present position at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville as Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Professor Bursten has been a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation Teacher-Scholar and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow, and he has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At Ohio State he has received the University Distinguished Teaching Award in 1982 and 1996, the Arts and Sciences Student Council Outstanding Teaching Award in 1984, and the University Distinguished Scholar Award in 1990. He received the Spiers Memorial Prize and Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2003, and the Morley Medal of the Cleveland Section of the American Chemical Society in 2005. He was elected President of the American Chemical Society for 2008. In addition to his teaching and service activities, Professor Bursten's research program focuses on compounds of the transition-metal and actinide elements.

CATHERINE J. MURPHY received two B.S. degrees, one in Chemistry and one in Biochemistry, from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1986. She received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin in 1990. She was a National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology from 1990 to 1993. In 1993, she joined the faculty of the University of South Carolina, Columbia, where she is currently the Guy F. Lipscomb Professor of Chemistry. Professor Murphy has been honored for both research and teaching as a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow, a Cottrell Scholar of the Research Corporation, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award winner and a subsequent NSF Award for Special Creativity. She has also received a USC Mortar Board Excellence in Teaching Award, the USC Golden Key Faculty Award for Creative Integration of Research and Undergraduate Teaching, the USC Michael J. Mungo Undergraduate Teaching Award, and the USC Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor Award. Since 2006, Professor Murphy has served as a Senior Editor to the Journal of Physical Chemistry. Professor Murphy’s research program focuses on the synthesis and optical properties of inorganic nanomaterials, and on the local structure and dynamics of the DNA double helix.

PATRICK M. WOODWARD received B.S. degrees in both Chemistry and Engineering from Idaho State University in 1991. He received a M.S. degree in Materials Science and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Oregon State University in 1996. He spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics at Brookhaven National Laboratory. In 1998, he joined the faculty of the Chemistry Department at The Ohio State University where he currently holds the rank of Associate Professor. He has enjoyed visiting professorships at the University of Bordeaux, in France, and the University of Sydney, in Australia. Professor Woodward has been an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award winner. He currently serves as an Associate Editor to the Journal of Solid State Chemistry and as the director of the Ohio REEL program, an NSF funded center that works to bring authentic research experiments into the laboratories of 1st and 2nd year chemistry classes in 15 colleges and universities across the state of Ohio. Professor Woodward’s research program focuses on understanding the links between bonding, structure and properties of solid state inorganic functional materials.