Professor Jonathan L. Sessler was born in Urbana, Illinois, USA on May 20, 1956. He received a B.S. degree (with highest honors) in chemistry in 1977 from the University of California, Berkeley. He obtained a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Stanford University in 1982 (supervisor: Professor James P. Collman). He was a NSF-CNRS and NSF-NATO Postdoctoral Fellow with Professor Jean-Marie Lehn at L’Universit? Louis Pasteur de Strasbourg, France. He was then a JSPS Visiting Scientist in Professor Tabushi’s group in Kyoto, Japan. In September 1984 he accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin. In September 1989 he was promoted to Associate Pro-fessor and in September of 1992 was promoted to Full Professor. He now serves as the Doherty-Welch Chair. Dr. Sessler has authored or coauthored over 850 research publications, written two books (with Dr. Steven J. Weghorn and Won-Seob Cho and Philip A. Gale, respectively), and been an inventor of record on over 80 issued or allowed U.S. Patents. Dr. Sessler was also a cofounder (with Dr. Richard A. Miller) of Pharmacyclics, Inc., a publicly traded company that was acquired for $21B by AbbVie in 2015 and more recently with Jonathan F. Arambula, OncoTEX, Inc., both of which were dedicated to developing new cancer therapies. He has won numerous awards for both his teaching and research and was recently elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.