Dr. Anselm C. Griffin is Emeritus Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his B.S. in Chemistry from Mississippi College and his Ph.D. also in Chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin in 1975. After joining the faculty of the University of Southern Mississippi in 1975 as Assistant Professor of Chemistry, Griffin rose through the academic ranks to hold positions as Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry and as Professor of Polymer Science. From 1990 – 1993, he served as founding Director of the Melville Laboratory for Polymer Synthesis at the University of Cambridge (U.K.). He was the first holder of Southern Mississippi's Bennett Distinguished Professorship in the Sciences. In 1997, he was appointed Dean of the Graduate School at Southern Mississippi later becoming the Southern Miss Provost in 2001. In 2002 he came to Georgia Tech as Professor and Chair of the School of Polymer, Textile and Fiber Engineering. He served in that position until the merger of PTFE with the School of Materials Science and Engineering in 2010 after which he then served as co-Chair and, later, as Chair of MSE until 2012. He has co-edited a number of volumes and monographs, has published over one hundred and twenty research papers, and has authored or co-authored several hundred technical presentations. He has received research grants and contracts from the National Science Foundation, the American Chemical Society, 3M, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the United Kingdom's Science and Engineering Research Council among others. In 1989 he chaired the Gordon Research Conference on Liquid Crystals. Among his research interests are supramolecular polymers, liquid crystalline elastomers and negative Poisson's ratio polymers.