Chad A. Mirkin is the Director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology and the George B. Rathmann Prof. of Chemistry, Chemical and Biological Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Materials Science & Engineering, and Medicine at Northwestern University. He is a chemist and a world renowned nanoscience expert, who is known for his discovery and development of spherical nucleic acids (SNAs) and SNA-based biodetection and therapeutic schemes, Dip-Pen Nanolithography (DPN) and related cantilever-free nanopatterning methodologies, On-Wire Lithography (OWL), and Co-Axial Lithography (COAL), and contributions to supramolecular chemistry and nanoparticle synthesis. He is the author of over 650 manuscripts and over 1,000 patent applications worldwide (285 issued), and he is the founder of multiple companies, including Nanosphere, AuraSense, and Exicure, which are commercializing nanotechnology applications in the life sciences and biomedicine. Mirkin has been recognized with over 100 national and international awards, including the 2016 Dan David Prize and the inaugural Sackler Prize in Convergence Research. He is a Member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science & Technology (Obama Administration), and one of very few scientists to be elected to all three US National Academies. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Inventors, among others. Mirkin has served on the Editorial Advisory Boards of over 20 scholarly journals, including JACS, Angew. Chem., and Adv. Mater. At present, he is an Associate Editor of JACS, and he is the founding editor of the journal Small. Mirkin holds a B.S. from Dickinson College (1986, elected into Phi Beta Kappa) and a Ph.D. from the Penn. State Univ. (1989). He was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the MIT prior to becoming a professor at Northwestern Univ. in 1991. Mirkin states, "GRC should continue to target the cutting edge advances in science, incorporate the excitement and support of the new generation of young scientists, and deeply explore the boundaries of disciplines".