C. Jeffrey Brinker received his Ph.D. from Rutgers in 1979, working under the direction of Lisa Klein on alkali metal corrosion of glass. He has gone on to become the world’s leading figure in the field of sol-gel chemistry, currently a senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories and a distinguished professor at the University of New Mexico. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2002 and received the prestigious Department of Energy Ernest O. Lawrence Award in Materials Science later that same year. Dr. Brinker is renowned for his fundamental contributions to the synthesizing of oxides and ceramics and is co-author of the most frequently cited book in the field. A current challenge in molecular engineering is self-assembly, which directs molecules to their equilibrium positions using chemistry; sol-gel processing of nanomaterials is helping to meet that challenge.