Joseph Alford, PhD, retired from Eli Lilly and Co. in 2006, after 35 years with the company (Email: jmalford5@earthlink.net; Phone: (317) 331-0928). After serving for two years in the U.S. Navy as an engineering officer on an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War, he began his career at Eli Lilly, where he helped to lead the development of a fermentation-process-control and data historian system, which was used throughout the company’s major bioprocess plants. He served as a chief computer systems validation auditor and as head of the Advanced Process Technologies Group. Alford received a BS from Purdue Univ. and MS and PhD from the Univ. of Cincinnati, all in chemical engineering. He is a Fellow of AIChE and the International Society of Automation (ISA).