Allen J. Bard, Hackerman-Welch Regents Chair Professor and director of the Center for Electrochemistry, University of Texas at Austin, USA Allen J. Bard was born in New York City on December 18, 1933 and grew up and attended public schools there, including the Bronx High School of Science (1948-51). He attended The City College of the College of New York (CCNY) (B.S., 1955) and Harvard University (M.A., 1956, PhD., 1958). He joined the faculty at The University of Texas at Austin (UT) in 1958, and has spent his whole career there. He has been the Hackerman-Welch Regents Chair in Chemistry at UT since 1985. He spent a sabbatical in the CNRS lab of Jean-Michel Saveant in Paris in 1973 and a semester in 1977 at the California Institute of Technology, where he was a Sherman Mills Fairchild Scholar. He was also a Baker lecturer at Cornell University in the spring of 1987 and the Robert Burns Woodward visiting professor at Harvard University in 1988. He has worked as mentor and collaborator with 75 Ph.D students, 17 M.S. students, 150 postdoctoral associates, and numerous visiting scientists. He has published over 900 peer-reviewed research papers, more than 80 book chapters and other publications, authored 3 books, and has received over 30 patents. He served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Chemical Society 1982-2001. Michael V. Mirkin, Professor of Chemistry, Queens College at the City University of New York, USA Michael V. Mirkin is professor of chemistry at Queens College, City University of New York. His professional interests are in the application of electrochemical methods to solving problems in physical and analytical chemistry and include charge-transfer reactions at solid-liquid and liquid-liquid interfaces, electrochemical kinetics, and nanoelectrochemistry. He has published more than 110 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters and co-edited the first monograph on scanning electrochemical microscopy. He earned a PhD in electrochemistry (1987) from Kazakh State University (former USSR) and did postdoctoral research at the University of Texas at Austin from 1990 to 1993.