Lionel Vayssieres is a senior researcher at theInternationalCenter for Young Scientists, National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) inTsukuba,Japan; a R&D consultant; and a guest scientist at the Chemical Sciences Division and Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,USA. He obtained his M.Sc. in Physical Chemistry (1991) and Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry (1995) from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie inParis. He then carried out postdoctoral research at Uppsala University, Sweden and also spent time as a visiting researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, the UNESCO Centre for Macromolecules & Materials, Stellenbosch University, the Glenn T. Seaborg Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Texas Materials Institute, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), the University of Queensland, Nanyang Technological University, and the iThemba LABS in South Africa. Vayssieres has (co-)authored around 50 refereed publications, which have generated over 1600 citations (since 2000). He has presented over 160 lectures in over 25 countries and has acted as chairman, executive program committee member, and advisory member at major international conferences and projects worldwide. Vayssieres is the founder and editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Nanotechnology and founder, organizer and chairman of the first international symposium dedicated to Solar Hydrogen & Nanotechnology (San Diego, CA 2006), which was sponsored by the International Society for Optical Engineering. He has been working on nanomaterials for solar energy conversion since 1996 and published the first nanorod-based solar cells paper in 2000.