DENNIS W. HESS, PhD, is the Thomas C. DeLoach Jr. Emeritus Professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where his research focused on films, surfaces, interfaces, and plasma processing. He was previously a research staff member and supervisor of process development at Fairchild Semiconductor, a professor of chemical engineering at the Univ. of California, Berkeley, and Chair of the Chemical Engineering Dept. at Lehigh Univ. Hess has served as associate editor of Chemistry of Materials and editor of Electrochemical and Solid State Letters and ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology. He was President of the Electrochemical Society (1996–1997), and is a Fellow of AIChE, the American Chemical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Electrochemical Society. Hess received a BS in chemistry from Albright College, and MS and PhD degrees in physical chemistry from Lehigh Univ.