Dr. Richard J. Spontak is a Distinguished Professor in the North Carolina State University in Raleigh. He received his Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 1988. He then pursued post-doctoral research in Materials Science and Metallurgy at the University of Cambridge (U.K.) and the Institute for Energy Technology (Norway) before joining the Corporate Research Division of the Procter and Gamble Company in 1990. Although active in a diverse range of disciplines, his primary research interests relate to the phase behavior and morphology/property development of nanostructured polymers, coatings, stimuli-responsive soft materials, and network-forming polymers. He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards such as the ACS Cooperative Research Award in Polymer Science, Engineering and the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3) Colwyn Medal. He has served as the Lars Onsager Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He is an elected fellow of the American Physical Society, IOM3 and the Royal Society of Chemistry; he is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences; and he is or has been on the editorial advisory board of more than 20 international journals.