Professor Yuval Golan obtained his PhD in the Department of Materials and Interfaces, the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1996. He then spent 3.5 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 Director of the Ilse Katz Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology at BGU. His research interests are in the area of Nanomaterials at Interfaces and include surfactant assisted synthesis of nanomaterials and chemical epitaxy of semiconductor thin films. Prof. Golan has published over 150 research papers in peer-reviewed scientific international journals and supervised some 40 junior researchers. Since 2016 Prof. Golan has been serving as Chairman of the Synchrotron Committee of the Israeli Academy of Science. In 2020 Golan was appointed deputy vice-president and dean for research & development at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.