Richard G. Weiss was born in Akron, Ohio, USA, in 1942. He received an S.cB. from Brown University in 1965 and M.Sc. (1967) and Ph.D. (1969) degrees from the University of Connecticut. In 1974, he began as an assistant professor at the Department of Chemistry, of Georgetown University and became a professor in 1986. His research interests are in the areas of materials and physical organic chemistry and organic photochemistry and photophysics, syntheses and properties of thermally and chemically reversible gels, the study of reaction rates and mechanisms, anisotropic solvent effects on reaction mechanisms, ionic liquid crystals as mechanistic probes and "green solvents" and molecular processes in polymers.