L. Gary Leal is a Professor of Chemical, Mechanical and Materials Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has taught at UCSB since 1989. Before that, from 1970 to 1989, he taught in the chemical engineering department at Caltech. His current research interests are focused on fluid mechanics problems for complex fluids, as well as the dynamics of bubbles and drops in flow, coalescence, thin-film stability and related problems in rheology. In 1987, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. His research and teaching have been recognized by a number of awards, including the Dreyfus Foundation Teacher-Scholar Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Allan Colburn and Warren Walker Awards of the AIChE, the Bingham Medal of the Society of Rheology and the Fluid Dynamics Prize of the American Physical Society. Since 1995, Professor Leal has been one of the two editors of Physics of Fluids (AIP) and has also served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics among others and the Cambridge Series in Chemical Engineering. His previous books include Laminar Flow and Convective Transport Processes, and he has contributed to A Gallery of Fluid Motion and Multimedia Fluid Mechanics, 2nd edition.