After completing a Ph.D. at the University of New South Wales, Dr Geoff Barnes spent two years at Columbia University in New York and then two more years at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich. He returned to Australia in 1962 to take up a position as Lecturer in Physical Chemistry at The University of Queensland and retired as Reader in 1994. For most of this period he worked in Surface Chemistry with a special interest in insoluble monolayers. Since retirement he has worked with Ian Gentle on various research projects and more recently in the writing of Interfacial Science: An Introduction. Ian Gentle received a Ph.D. from the University of Sydney in 1988 and, after postdoctoral positions at the University of New England and the Australian National University, was appointed as Lecturer in Chemistry at the University of Queensland in 1993. He was promoted to Professor in 2009. Since then he and his group have published widely in various aspects of science related to interfaces. Throughout his career he has had a strong interest in the application of synchrotron and neutron radiation to interfacial science and since late 2008 has held the position of Head of Science at the Australian Synchrotron, while maintaining his research group at the University of Queensland.
Review from previous edition The book is particularly remarkable in the simplicity of demonstrating basic thermodynamic notions and also on the thorough descriptions it gives of up-to-date physical characterization techniques. I strongly recommend this book, not only to undergraduate students... but also to a wider audience, particularly PhD students who would benefit from a brief but complete overview on the physical chemistry of surfaces and interfaces. It is perfectly suited to professors who would like to introduce basic interface notions to students in science. Dr Francois Ganachaud, ENSCM, Montpellier - ChemPhysChem 2006, 7, 965-967, Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. This is a very well written account of the main aspects of interfacial science. It is suitable for intermediate and senior undergraduates and fills a gap in the currently available text books. Jack Yarwood, Royal Society of Chemistry 2006 Barnes and Gentle present fascinating examples... an ideal textbook. Joseph Keddie (reader in Physics, Surrey University) - Times Higher Education 2008 Barnes and Gentle take a well-rounded approach, carefully considering the mathematics of interface behaviour along with the physical properties. SciTech Book News - 2006 Book News Inc., Portland, OR