Kannan M. Krishnan received his B. Tech in Mechanical Engineering from IIT, Kanpur (India) in 1978, his MS in Materials Science from SUNY, Stony Brook in 1980 and his Ph.D in Materials Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984. He subsequently held various scientific and teaching positions at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, UC Berkeley before joining the University of Washington, in 2001, as the Campbell Chair Professor of Materials Science and Adjunct Professor of Physics. He has also held visiting appointments at the Hitachi Central Research Laboratory (Japan), Tohoku University, Danish Technical University, University of Sao Paolo, University of Western Australia and Indian Institute of Science. Prof. Krishnan is well recognized for both research and teaching. His many awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship (2004), the Rockefeller Bellagio Residency Fellowship (2008), the Burton Medal (Microscopy Society of America, 1992), Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science Senior Scientist Fellowship (2002), the University of Washington, College of Engineering Outstanding Educator Award (2004) and an appointment as the Professor-at-large at the University of Western Australia (2006-8). He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Institute of Physics (London), and has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Materials Science and Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics. Prof. Krishnan’s inter-disciplinary research interests are in magnetic nanostructures and thin film heterostructures, biomedical nanomagnetics, oxide spin electronics, advanced materials characterization and structure-property correlations at relevant length scales. All the projects are vertically integrated from the underlying science to their engineering (information storage, MEMS, magnetoelectronic devices) and biomedical (diagnostics, imaging and therapeutics) applications.