Professor Yuval Golan obtained his PhD from the Department of Materials and Interfaces at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1996 and spent three years as a postgraduate researcher at the Materials Research Laboratory, University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1999 he joined the Department of Materials Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and in 2010 he was promoted to full professor and appointed as Director of the Ilse Katz Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology at BGU. His research interests include surfactant assisted synthesis of nanomaterials and chemical epitaxy of semiconductor thin films. Prof. Golan is chairman of the synchrotron committee of the Israeli Academy of Science.