New Year Editorial 2015

Curt Wentrup was educated at the University of Copenhagen (Cand. Scient. 1966 with K. A. Jensen; D.Sc. 1976) and the Australian National University (Ph.D. 1969 with W. D. Crow). After post-doctoral periods with Hans Dahn (Lausanne), W. M. Jones (Gainesville, FL) and Maitland Jones, Jr (Princeton, NJ), he held academic positions at the Université de Lausanne, Switzerland, and a professorship at the Universität Marburg, Germany, before returning to Australia in 1985 as Professor and Chair of Organic Chemistry and Head of the Organic Chemistry Section at the University of Queensland, where he is now Emeritus Professor. Since 2008, he has been the editor-in-chief of the Australian Journal of Chemistry, and he is the immediate-past chair of the National Committee for Chemistry. He has published over 350 research papers, reviews, and books on reactive intermediates and unusual molecules. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, and a recipient of the Centenary Medal of the Australian Commonwealth (2003), the David Craig Medal of the Academy of Science as well as the A. J. Birch Medal of the RACI (2014). He collaborates strongly with research groups in Europe and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Université de Pau, France, in 2014.

Greg G. Qiao is a professor and Australian Research Council professorial Future Fellow in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at The University of Melbourne. In 1982, he completed his B.Eng. degree in polymer engineering at Donghua University, China, and in 1996 received his Ph.D. in synthetic organic chemistry from The University of Queensland. He then moved to The University of Melbourne, where he entered the field of synthetic polymer chemistry and engineering. He became a lecturer in the Department of Chemical and Bimolecular Engineering in 2002, and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2004, Associate Professor and Reader in 2007, and full Professor in 2009. Professor Qiao has published more than 150 journal papers and holds more than 16 full patents. His key research interests are in the synthesis of novel macromolecular architectures by controlled polymerisation, polymeric membranes for gas separation, polymeric scaffolds for soft tissue engineering, and functional polymers for specific applications in mineral processing, paint products, commercial packaging, and water mitigation.

Associate Professor Martyn Coles received his B.Sc. (Hons) First Class from the University of Durham in 1992, and elected to stay in Durham for his Ph.D. studies under the supervision of Professor Vernon C. Gibson. He obtained a NATO Post-Doctoral Fellowship, which he undertook in the University of Iowa in the USA with Professor Richard F. Jordan. After a second post-doctoral stint at the University of California, Berkeley, with Professor T. Don Tilley, he joined the faculty at the University of Sussex, UK, in 1999, where he was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2005. In 2011, he moved to the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, where he is currently Associate Professor.

Professor Michael Breadmore is an ARC Future Fellow (2013–2017) at the Australian Centre for Research on Separation Science (ACROSS) based at the University of Tasmania. His research interests lie in the application of capillary and microchip electrophoresis for the trace analysis of environmental, clinical, and forensic samples, as well as in methods for the low-cost fabrication of microfluidic devices.