Franz Faupel received his PhD in physics from Göttingen University in 1985. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the IBM Th. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, and got his habilitation from Göttingen University in 1992. Since 1994, he holds the Chair for Multicomponent Materials at Kiel University. Faupel, inter alia, is Chairman of the North German Initiative Nanotechnology and has been serving on several editorial boards including Materials, SN Applied Sciences, Journal of Materials Research, Applied Physics Letters, and Journal of Applied Physics. He was also a member of the Minerva-Weizmann Committee of the Max Planck Society and Dean of the Faculty of Engineering. He published more than 400 peer-reviewed papers on functional nanocomposites, metal-polymer interfaces, diffusion, glass transition, metallic glasses, plasma deposition, magnetoelectric sensors, plasmonic metamaterials, photocatalysis, memristive devices for bioinspired neuromorphic computing and other subjects