Professor Jonathan L. Sessler was born in Urbana, Illinois, USA on May 20, 1956. He received a B.S. degree (with highest honors) in chemistry in 1977 from the University of California, Berkeley. He obtained a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Stanford University in 1982 (supervisor: Professor James P. Collman). He was a NSF-CNRS and NSF-NATO Postdoctoral Fellow with Professor Jean-Marie Lehn at L'Universit? Louis Pasteur de Strasbourg, France. He was then a JSPS Visiting Scientist in Professor Tabushi's group in Kyoto, Japan. In September 1984 he accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin. In September 1989 he was promoted to Associate Pro-fessor and in September of 1992 was promoted to Full Professor. Dr. Sessler has authored or coauthored over 225 research publications, written one book (with Dr. Steven J. Weghorn), and been an inventor of record on almost 60 issued or allowed U.S. Patents. Dr. Sessler is also a cofounder (with Dr. Richard A. Miller) of Pharmacyclics, Inc., a publicly traded company (pcyc; NASDQ) dedicated to developing various biomedical applications of expanded porphyrins. He has won numerous awards for both his teaching and research and was recently named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.