Dr. Georges Belfort: Endowed chair Russell Sage Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at RPI. He received his BS degree in CHME at the University of Cape Town and PhD in Engineering from UC Irvine. He has broad research interests include mass transfer and membrane filtration, protein misfolding and kinetics, single molecule force spectroscopy, and bioseparations. He has received the two major awards in the US on Separations (ACS (1995) and AIChE (2000)), the ACS Murphree Award in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry (2008), and is one of the “100 Chemical Engineers of the Modern Erae as part of the AIChE Centennial Celebration in 2008. He was elected a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, February 2003.