Professor John H. S. Lee is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at McGill University. His research areas are in combustion, detonations and shock wave physics, and explosion dynamics; he has been carrying out fundamental and applied research in these areas for the past 40 years. He is a consultant and has served on numerous government and industrial advisory committees on explosion hazards and safety since the late 1960s. He is a recipient of the silver medal from the Combustion Institute (1980), the Dionizy Smolenski Medal from the Polish Academy of Sciences (1988), and the Nuna Manson gold medal (1991) for his outstanding contributions to the fundamentals and applied aspects of explosion and detonation phenomena. He is also a two-time recipient of the Faculty Outstanding Teaching Award (1989 and 1995) and was elected as honorary professor of the Institute of Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2003) and recipient of the Outstanding Alumni Award of the Polytechnic University of Hong Kong (2003). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.