Michael P. Cava was born in Brooklyn, New York on February 13, 1926.  He entered Harvard University in 1943 and received a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry from that institution in 1946.  His graduate studies were carried out at the University of Michigan which awarded him a Master of Science degree in Chemistry in 1948 and a Ph.D. degree in Chemistry in 1951.  His doctoral preceptor was the late Professor W.E. Bachmann.  During the period 1951 through 1953, Dr. Cava was a Research Associate at Harvard University where he held a U.S. Public Health Postdoctoral Fellowship and worked with Professor R.B. Woodward.  He was on the staff of the Department of Chemistry of the Ohio State University from 1953 through 1965, during which time he held the positions of Assistant Professor (1953 - 1958), Associate Professor (1958 - 1963), and Professor (1963 - 1965).  He then held the position of Professor of Chemistry at Wayne State University from 1965 through 1969.  From July 1969 through June 1985, Dr. Cava was Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania.   He has also been a Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois (1957) and the University of California at Santa Barbara (1968).  He has been a Fellow of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (1958 - 1962) and has spent research leaves in Switzerland (1959), in Brazil (1965), and in France (1979).  In the winter of 1973, he was Sir C.V. Raman Visiting Professor at Madras University, India.  From September 1984 to August 1985, Dr. Cava was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, enabling him to study at the University of Paris and at the University of California at Santa Barbara.  Since July 1985, he has been at the University of Alabama as the Ramsay Professor of Chemistry.   Dr. Cava has served as a member of the Executive Committee of the Organic Division, American Chemical Society, and the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Organic Chemistry, Heterocycles, Sulfur Letters, and Sulfur Reports.  He has served as a member of the Medicinal Chemistry Study Section B (1966 - 1970) and Section A (1986 - 1991), National Institutes of Health.  In 1992, Dr. Cava received the University of Alabama's Burnum Award for Outstanding Teaching.  In 1996, he was awarded the University of Alabama's Blackmon-Moody Outstanding Professor Award.  He has authored or co-authored 411 scientific papers, a chemical monograph, and two textbooks.

Professor Cava's research areas extend over several different areas of organic chemistry.  In the field of natural products, he is interested in the chemistry of biologically significant compounds, especially those derived from aromatic or heterocyclic systems.  Other research interests include the organic chemistry of Group VI elements, especially sulfur and tellurium, as well as material science studies aimed at the synthesis of new organic metals and non-linear optical materials.

Robert M. Metzger was born in Japan in 1940 of Hungarian parents.  He was educated in France, Italy, and the United Kingdom.  He obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry from the University of California Los Angeles in 1962.  His post graduate studies were performed at Caltech where in 1966 he was awarded the Ph.D. degree in Chemistry.  From 1969 through 1971, he attended Stanford University doing his postdoctoral work.   Professor Metzger has taught at the University of Mississippi at Oxford (1971 - 1986) and at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa (1986 - present).  He presently holds the position of Professor of Chemistry at the University of Alabama and is a member of the Materials Science faculty.  Professor Metzger has written more than 140 research publications, among them the "Unimolecular Electrical Rectification in Hexadecylquinolinium Tricyanoquinodimethanide" which was published in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.  He has edited or co-edited four books and has attended conferences and presented invited papers in 21 foreign countries.  Professor Metzger has directed the research of nine Ph.D. students, one M.S. student, and over a dozen postdoctoral associates.Professor Metzger's research interests in physical chemistry are extensive.  From 1971 through 1983, he studied the cohesion of organic ionic crystals.  In 1976, he determined experimentally that the organic metal TTF TCNQ was thermodynamically stable.  He studied the paramagnetic resonance and crystal structure of several organic semiconductors, the cohesion of high-temperature ceramic oxide superconductors, and the magnetism of iron in porous aluminum oxide.In 1992, Professor Metzger's research in molecular electronics led to the discovery that Langmuir-Blodgett multilayers of fullerene, when doped with potassium, became super-thin superconductors at low temperatures (i.e., temperatures lower than in bulk).  In 1997, he found that the zwitterionic crystal hexadecylquinolinium tricyanoquinodimethanide was a unimolecular rectifier of electrical current, which may be the world's smallest electronic device and one of the first examples of a truly unimolecular electronic device.

Josef Michl was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1939.   He studied at the Charles University in Prague with V. Horák and P. Zuman, and at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences with R. Zahradnik, receiving his Ph.D. in 1965.   He enjoyed a rich variety of postdoctoral experiences covering a range of experimental and theoretical chemistry with R.S. Becker at the University of Houston, M.J.S. Dewar at the University of Texas, A.C. Albrecht at Cornell University, J. Linderberg at Aarhus University, and finally with F.E. Harris in physics at the University of Utah.  He joined the department of chemistry at the University of Utah in 1970 and served as Chairman from 1979 through 1984.  He left Utah in 1986, moving to the University of Texas in Austin as the Collie-Welch Regents Chair Professor.  In 1991, he was lured to his current position as Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Colorado in Boulder.  Professor Michl has held numerous visiting positions and named lectureships throughout the world.  He has received honorary degrees from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. and from the University of Pardubice in the Czech Republic.

Professor Michl has earned an international reputation in the close integration of experiment and theory in his research.  His publications span an extraordinary breadth of areas, including organic, inorganic, analytical, physical, and theoretical chemistry.  He has, in particular, been instrumental in the current understanding of organic photochemistry.  His applications of novel methodologies in matrix isolation spectroscopy have been groundbreaking, leading to a deeper knowledge of the fundamental properties of highly reactive and high-energy molecules.  His studies on silicon reactive intermediates and oligosilanes have been instrumental in the understanding of photochemical processes in silicon-based polymers.   He has long enjoyed a fruitful collaboration with scientists at IBM, helping to produce currently used photoresists and new optical storage systems.  In recent years, he has focused on new classes of rigid-rod molecules, systems he has termed "staffanes", as well as oligomeric carboranes, to assemble ordered materials with interesting and useful physical properties -- a molecular-sized "Tinkertoy" set.

Professor Michl has received numerous awards including a Sloan Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Humboldt Senior U.S. Scientist Award, the Utah Section Award and the Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society, the Schrödinger Medal from the World Association of Theoretical Organic Chemists, the 1994 award from the Inter-American Photochemical Society, the Heyrovsky Gold Medal from the Czech Academy of Sciences, and the Gold Medal of the Charles University in Prague. In 1986, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and in 1988 to the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.  He is a WATOC Fellow and an honorary member of the Czech Learned Society.  Professor Michl is currently the editor of Chemical Reviews and is an Editorial Board member of Accounts of Chemical Research, Bulletin of the Chemical Society of Japan, Chemistry-a European Journal, Collection of Czechoslovak Chemical Communications, and International Journal of Quantum Chemistry.  He had a long association with IUPAC, where he chaired the Photochemistry Commission from 1985 through 1989.  He has co-authored five books on photochemistry and polarization spectroscopy, several patents, and over 400 scientific papers.  His current areas of interest are modular chemistry, highly reactive molecules, molecular electronic structure, silicon and boron chemistry, and photochemistry.

Mark A. Ratner was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1942.  He received his Bachelors degree from Harvard University in 1964.   He continued his post graduate studies at Northwestern University where in 1969 he received his Ph.D. in Chemistry.  Dr. Ratner is currently Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University.  He has received numerous teaching awards from the University including the University Distinguished Teacher Award and has been named to the Faculty Teaching Honor Roll no less than 12 times.

Dr. Ratner holds the reputation among his peers for being one of the founders of molecular electronics.  His laboratory research focuses on the theoretical underpinnings of molecular electronics, concentrating on the optical, electronic, conductive, switching recognition, and structural aspects of individual molecules.  His theoretical work focuses on understanding and predicting the behavior of molecular wire interconnects, transistors, optoelectronic switches, recognition elements and junctions.  The methodological tools vary from extended electronic structure studies through molecular dynamics simulations, structural modeling, gating models, and the applications of quantum dynamical methodology to the characterization of quantum dynamics in molecular scale wires.  Through extensive collaboration with experimental and theoretical groups worldwide, his research group has been able to calculate actual molecular wire conductances and to characterize their dependence upon molecular geometry, relaxations and vibrations, interfacial structures, and molecular environments.  His research continues in a pursuit to understand the general behaviors of individual molecules acting as devices.

Dr. Ratner has authored or co-authored over 330 technical publications in numerous professional journals.  He is currently on the editorial boards of over eight publications including the Journal of the American Chemical Society and the Journal of Physical Chemistry.  Professor Ratner serves on the International Board of Governors for both Tel-Aviv University and Hebrew University and as a Board Member for Electrochemical Industries (Frutatrom) in Israel.  He is a Board Member of the Northwestern University Hillel Foundation and has served as a Member of the Illinois Governor=s Science Advisory Council for six years.

Fred Wudl is the Courtaulds Professor of Chemistry and Materials and Director of the Exotic Materials Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received a B.S. (1964) and a Ph.D. (1967) degree from UCLA where his dissertation work was done with Professor Donald J. Cram. After postdoctoral research with R.B. Woodward at Harvard University, he joined the faculty of the State University of New York at Buffalo. He then moved, first in 1972 to AT&T Bell Laboratories and subsequently to the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1982, then to UCLA in 1997.

Professor Wudl has received numerous awards including Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, William Rauscher Lecturer in Chemistry Award (Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute), Karcher Lecturer (University of Oklahoma), Peter A. Leemakers Lecturer , 3M Lecturer (University of British Columbia), Stouffer Award (USC), Arthur D. Little Award, Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, Wheland Medal, Clapp Lecturer (Brown University), The Guilio Natta Medal, ACS Award for Chemistry of Materials, and Bayer Lecturer (Cornell University).

He is currently the editor of Molecular Crystals and Liquid Crystals and is an Editorial Board member of Current Opinion in Solid State and Materials Science. He is also an Advisory Board member of Synlett. He has co-authored over 300 scientific papers and holds nine U.S. patents.

Professor Wudl is most widely known for his work on organic conductors and superconductors. He discovered the electronic conductivity of the precursor to the first organic metal and superconductor. In the recent past he has been interested in electronically conducting polymers where he discovered the first transparent organic conductor and the first self-doped polymers. Currently, he is interested in the optical and electrooptical properties of processable conjugated polymers as well as in the organic chemistry of fullerenes and the design and preparation of organic ferromagnets, particularly ferromagnetic organic metals.

James J. Marek, Jr., the Company's President and CEO, was born in Chicago, Illinois on December 22, 1943.  After graduating from Marquette University in 1966 with a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering degree, Mr. Marek joined industry as a design engineer for the Bell System, specifically Western Electric and Bell Telephone Laboratories.  During the next 14 years in the Bell System, he progressed from engineering into product consulting, product management, and project management.  As a Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories, he was awarded a patent for his design work.  At Western Electric, he held such management positions as Department Chief and Assistant Manager.  In 1980, Mr. Marek left the Bell System to expand his base of experience.  He has worked for various high technology companies where he gained experience in product management, manufacturing, operations, sales, marketing (domestic and international), finance, human resources, customer service, legal, staff development, and general management.  He has held the positions of Director of Product Management and Marketing, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, General Manager, President, CEO, and Treasurer.  Mr. Marek has served on the Board of Directors of two companies.  He has been a successful independent management consultant specializing in startup companies, turnaround restructuring, sales and marketing management, and contract negotiations.  He has performed post graduate work in Communications, Marketing, Finance, Accounting, and Business Administration at the University of Colorado in Denver, the Western Electric Corporate Education Center, and the American Management Association.