Dr. Rodney S. Ruoff, John Evans Professor of Nanoengineering, Northwestern University, IL
Rodney S. Ruoff is the John Evans Professor of Nanoengineering at Northwestern University and director of the NU BIOMAT Center. He received his B.S. in chemistry with high honors from the University of Texas-Austin in 1981 and his Ph.D. in chemical physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign in 1988. His professional experience includes: Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institut fuer Stroemungsforshung in Goettingen, Germany, 1989-1990; Postdoctoral Fellow at the IBM-Watson Research Laboratory, 1990-1991; Research Staff Scientist at the Molecular Physics Laboratory at SRI International, 1991-1996; Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at Washington University, 1997-2000; and Full Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University, 2000-present. He specializes in: synthesis and properties of nanostructures; nanomanipulation and nanorobotics; fabrication and properties of nanocomposites; particle electrokinetics and light scattering from particles; instrument development and technology transition; and new tools and methods for the biomedical sciences. He has published ~130 refereed technical publications and edited 8 books. He edits the Journal of Nanoengineering and Nanosystems and is an Associate Editor for the journal Composites Science and Technology. In addition to his publications, he holds 5 patents. He has been the US organizer of the 2003 Swiss-US Forum on Nanoscience and Nanotechnology and the 2004 Inter-Pacific Workshop on Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. Prof. Ruoff teaches 3 courses devoted to Nanotechnology.

Dr. Morinobu Endo, Professor, Shinshu University, Japan
Dr. Morinobu Endo is a professor at the Shinshu University in Japan. He received his BS and MS degrees from Shinshu University and PhD from Nagoya University in Japan. Dr. Endo is also an Honorary Professor of Beijing University of Chemical Technology, China since 2004. He has received many awards which include Carbon Society of Japan award in 1995, Charles E. Pettinos Award from American Carbon Society, USA in 2001, LEE HSUN Lecture Series Award from Institute of Metal Research, China in 2002, ShinMai Award from Shinmai Bunka Foundation, Japan in 2003, Ishikawa Award from Ishikawa Carbon Science Technology Promotion Foundation, Japan in 2003, American Carbon Society Medal for Achievement in Carbon Science in 2004, and The Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Prize for contribution to Intellectual Cluster, Japan in 2005. He has authored or co-authored more than 40 text books and 250 referred papers in prestigious journals including Nature, Science and Physical Review. His main research field is carbon science and application of novel carbon materials including nanocarbons.

Dr. Shoushan Fan, Professor, Tsinghua University, China
Dr. Shoushan Fan is a professor of physics at Tsinghua University, China. He is an academician of Chinese Academy of Science. He is also the Director of Tsinghua-Foxconn Nanotechnology Research Center. He has over hundred publications in peer-reviewed journals including Nature and Science.

Dr. Fan has been a visiting scientist at MIT (1984-1986), Harvard (1993-1995), and Stanford (1998). Fan was awarded Cheung Kong Scholar Achievement Award in 1999 and was elected as the Member of Chinese Academy of Science in 2003. His research interests include synthesis, characterization and applications of carbon nanotubes and nanorods.

Dr. Robert J. Robinson, Professor of College of Business, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Dr. Robert J. Robinson is a professor of College of Business at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Robert J. Robinson was born and raised in Durban, South Africa. He attended the University of Natal, Durban, graduating with a B.Commerce in 1983, majoring in Psychology, Business Administration, and Economics. In 1984 he completed a BA in Industrial and Organizational Psychology at the University of Cape Town, and in 1987 obtained his MA at the University of Cape Town. While working on his MA, he was employed as an internal consultant and facilitator at ESKOM (the national electricity utility), where he was involved in a huge turnaround project, being personally involved with job redesign, quality programs, and culture change. In 1987 he co-founded Work and Life Change, a management consulting company, before leaving for Stanford University, where he completed a Ph.D. in social psychology in 1991, specializing in group conflict. From 1991 to 2001 he was on the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration in Boston, Massachusetts. In 2001, Dr. Robinson was a visiting professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management before accepting the position of Barry and Virginia Weinman Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship and E-Business at the University of Hawaii, College of Business Administration. At UH, Dr. Robinson is also executive director of the Pacific Asian Center for Entrepreneurship and E-Business (PACE2). Dr. Robinson teaches in the areas of Entrepreneurship, Negotiation, and Management. Dr. Robinson was a faculty member of the Harvard Program on Negotiation (PON), and taught in executive programs there, at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government (Effective Decision Making and Strategies of Executive Influence), and at the Harvard Business School (Program for Management Development). He consults actively to industry, covering topics that include negotiation skills and analysis, decision-making, conflict management, group dynamics, and managing change. He served as co-director of the PON project on Psychological Processes in Negotiation, has authored numerous academic and business articles in the fields of social cognition, negotiation, conflict analysis, and ethics, and has been awarded several international academic writing prizes, including the Academy of Management (twice), and the International Association of Conflict Management (twice) Best Paper prizes. In 2001, his 1995 seminal paper on NaÔve Realism was selected by the Academy of Management as the Most Influential Paper Published in the Field of Conflict Management and Negotiation, 1993-1997.

His major current project concerns hi-tech startup companies and their entrepreneurial negotiations, covering the gamut from negotiating with potential partners for equity, negotiations with venture capital firms, and selling or taking the company public. Recently, he is the author (with Mark Van Osnabrugge) of Angel Investing: Matching Startup Funds with Startup Companies -- The Guide for Entrepreneurs, Individual Investors, and Venture Capitalists (2000, Jossey-Bass). In 2002 Dr. Robinson founded UH Angels, a Hawaii-based angel investor network which mentors and invests in startup firms. Dr. Robinson has also published on legal and health issues in the workplace.

Dr. Ben Wang, Assistant Vice President for Research in Engineering, Florida State University
Dr. Ben Wang is Assistant Vice President for Research in Engineering at the Florida State University, a Florida higher education institution of 38,000 students. He holds two distinguished professorships: Simon Ostrach Professor of Industrial Engineering and U.S. Department of Energy Massie Chair of Excellence in Engineering. He is Fellow of the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE), Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) and World Innovation Foundation (WIF), and serves as a member of the Life Boat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board.

Dr. Wang is widely acknowledged as a pioneer in the growing field of nano-materials science. His main area of research, involving an extraordinary material known as "BuckyPaper", has shown promise in a variety of applications, including the development of aerospace structures, the production of more-effective body armor and armored vehicles, the improvement of energy and power efficiency, the enhancement of thermal management of engineering systems, and the construction of next-generation computer displays.

In 1998, Dr. Wang founded the Florida Advanced Center for Composite Technologies (FACCT). As a direct result of his developing partnerships between universities and industries, in 2002, FACCT was selected by the National Science Foundation to join the NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) program.

With a primary research interest is applying emerging technologies to improve manufacturing competitiveness, he specializes in process development for affordable composite materials. AFOSR, AFRL, ARL, ARO, DARPA, DOE, NASA, NIST, NSF, ONR, SME, Sandia, 2Phase, AT&T, Boeing, British Petroleum, Caterpillar, Cummins Engine, GKN, GM, JEOL, Lockheed Martin, Motorola, MTS, Raytheon, Sikorsky, Sun Microsystems, TA Instrument, and Westinghouse are just some of his many sponsors. His attention to applications of the integrated product-process design approach to substituting metal structures with low-cost, high-performance composite materials is unique among researchers in these difficult and most promising investigations.

Dr. Wang is an editorial board member for the Journal of Multidiscipline Modeling in Materials and Structures, Composites B Journal, International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, Journal of Manufacturing Systems, Journal of Design and Manufacturing Automation, and Journal of the Chinese Institute of Industrial Engineers. He was elected to the US Council of the Japan-US Conference on Composite Materials in 2005.

He is a co-inventor on projects resulting in seven U.S. patents (5566092, 5566273, 5602761, 5939013, 6488569, 6532799, and US 2006/0017191A1). In addition to being the author or co-author of more than 130 refereed journal papers and 60 conference articles, he is a co-author of three books: Computer-Aided Manufacturing (Prentice-Hall), Computer-Aided Process Planning (Elsevier Science Publishers), and Computer Aided Manufacturing PC Application Software (Delmar Publishers). These books are currently being used worldwide.

Dr. Wang is a co-recipient of a 2004 R&D 100 Award. In 1999, Dr. Wang received the AT&T Industrial Ecology Fellow Award and the DOE Outstanding Research and Educational Accomplishment Award. In 1998, he received an IRI/ASEE Engineering Faculty Fellowship Award and a United Nations Development Program Fellowship. In addition, he is the recipient of the 1993 Tau Beta Pi National Engineering Honor Society Outstanding Professor Award. For his leadership and significant achievements in manufacturing education and research, Dr. Wang also received the 1990 SME Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award. In 1991, he received the University of Iowa Old Gold Iowa Fellowship, and in 1987, the New York State Improvement of Undergraduate Education Award. As further confirmation of his accomplishments, his biography is listed in Who's Who in Engineering, Who's Who in Global Business Leaders, Who's Who among Asian Americans, and Who's Who in the Midwest. He received his B.S.I.E. degree from Tunghai University (Taiwan) and M.S.I.E. and Ph.D. from the Pennsylvania State University.

Dr. Vijay K. Varadan, University of Arkansas, AK, USA
Dr. Vijay K. Varadan is currently the Twenty-First Century Endowed Chair in Nano-and Bio-Technology and Medicine, and Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering (College of Engineering) and Neurosurgery (College of Medicine) at University of Arkansas. He is also the Director of the Institute for Nano-, Micro-, and Neuro-Electronics, Sensors and Systems and the Director of the High Density Electronics Center. He has concentrated on the design and development of various electronic, acoustic and structural composites, smart materials, structures, and devices including sensors, transducers, Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS), synthesis and large scale fabrication of carbon nanotubes, NanoElectroMechanical Systems (NEMS), microwave, acoustic and ultrasonic wave absorbers and filters. He has developed neurostimulator, wireless microsensors and systems for sensing and control of Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, glucose in the blood and Alzhemier's disease. He is also developing both silicon and organic based wireless sensor systems with RFID for human gait analysis and sleep disorders and various neurological disorders. He is an editor of the Journal of Wave-Materials Interaction and the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Smart Materials and Structures. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Microlithography, Microfabrication and Microsystem. He serves on the editorial board of International Journal of Computational Methods. He has published more than 500 journal papers and 12 books. He has 12 patents pertinent to conducting polymers, smart structures, smart antennas, phase shifters, carbon nanotubes, implantable devices for Parkinson's patients, MEMS accelerometers and gyroscopes.