Chair of the Editorial Board—Professor Mina BissellProfessor Bissell is a pioneer in the area of the role of the extracellular matrix (ECM) and microenvironment in the regulation of tissue-specific function with special emphasis on breast cancer, where she has changed some established paradigms. She earned an A.B. with honors in Chemistry from Harvard/Radcliffe College and a PhD in bacterial genetics from Harvard University. She joined the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1972, became Director of Cell & Molecular Biology in 1988, and was appointed Director of all of Life Sciences in 1992. Upon stepping down as the Life Sciences Division Director, she was named a Distinguished Scientist. She is also the Office of Biological & Environmental Research/US Department of Energy (DOE) Distinguished Scientist Fellow in Life Sciences.Professor Bissell has authored more than 300 publications, is a member of 5 international scientific boards, and is on the editorial board of a dozen scientific journals, includingSciencemagazine. She has given more than 90 ‘named and distinguished’ lectures. Her awards include the Lawrence Award and Medal, the Mellon Award from the University of Pittsburgh, the Eli Lilly/Clowes Award from AACR, the first “Innovator Award” of the US Department of Defense (DOD) for breast cancer research, the Brinker Award from the Komen Foundation, the Discovery Health Channel Medical Honor and Medal, the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center Ted Couch Lectureship and Award, the Pezcoller Foundation–AACR International Award for Cancer Research, the 2008 Excellence in Science Award from FASEB. She has been awarded the 2008 Mina J. Bissell Award by the University of Porto and the 2008 American Cancer Society's Medal of Honor for Basic Research Award.Professor Bissell was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. She served as President of the American Society of Cell Biology and the International Society of Differentiation. She has received honorary doctorates from the Pierre & Marie Curie University in Paris and the University of Copenhagen.Scientific Editor—Professor Mary Helen Barcellos-HoffImages have been a major data source for Scientific Editor Mary Helen Barcellos-Hoff throughout her training and career. As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, she conducted neuroanatomy studies using electron microscopy. She obtained her doctorate in Experimental Pathology at the University of California, San Francisco, for studies in cell interactions during brain cancer therapy, and postgraduate research at the University of California, Berkeley, on functional analysis of mammary lactation. She and collaborators at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory developed imaging bioinformatic tools for high throughput microscopy. The goal is a systems biology analysis of radiation effects and consequences that integrates image information and functional data. She moved her lab to New York University’s Langone School of Medicine in 2008. Her current research program focuses on how ionizing radiation alters multicellular interactions during cancer development.Scientific Editor—Professor David BeebeDavid J. Beebe is a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also a member of the UW Comprehensive Cancer Center, Stem Cell Program, Materials Science Program, Biotechnology Training Program, Genomic Sciences Training Program and serves on the steering committee of the Stem Cell Training Program. He is the recipient of the IEEE EMBS Early Career Achievement Award, theLab on a ChipRoyal Society of Chemistry/Corning, Pioneers of Miniaturization Prize, the Romnes Award at UW-Madison and is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. He has also served as an Associate Editor for theJournal of MicroElectroMechanical Systems, theJournal of Biomechanical Engineering, and is currently on the Editorial Board ofLab on a Chip. Professor Beebe is a co-founder of Vitae LLC, Salus LLC and Ratio Inc. Past research topics have included development of non-traditional autonomous microfluidic devices and systems, and the study of cell and embryo development in microenvironments. David’s current interests center around the creation and use of microfluidic tools to understand cancer biology and improve cancer diagnosis and monitoring. His migration to more biological focused research was facilitated by a five year NIH “retraining” award in cancer biology.Editorial Board member—Professor Roger TsienRoger Y. Tsien, born in 1952, received his A.B. in Chemistry and Physics from Harvard College in 1972. He received his PhD in Physiology in 1977 from the University of Cambridge and remained as a Research Fellow until 1981. He then became an Assistant, Associate, then full Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1989 he moved to the University of California, San Diego, where he is an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Professor in the Departments of Pharmacology and Chemistry & Biochemistry. His honors include First Prize in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search (1968), the Searle Scholar Award (1983), the Artois-Baillet-Latour Health Prize (1995), the Gairdner Foundation International Award (1995), the Award for Creative Invention from the American Chemical Society (2002), the Heineken Prize in Biochemistry and Biophysics (2002), the Wolf Prize in Medicine (shared with Robert Weinberg, 2004), Rosenstiel Award (2006), and the E. B. Wilson Medal from the American Society for Cell Biology (shared with M. Chalfie, 2008). Professor Tsien was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2008 for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein (GFP). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society. Professor Tsien is best known for designing and building molecules that either report or perturb signal transduction inside living cells. These molecules, created by organic synthesis or by engineering naturally fluorescent proteins, have enabled many new insights into signalingviacalcium, sodium, pH, cyclic nucleotides, nitric oxide, inositol polyphosphates, membrane and redox potential changes, protein phosphorylation, active export of proteins from the nucleus, and gene transcription. He is now developing new ways to target contrast agents and therapeutic agents to tumor cells based on their expression of extracellular proteases.Editorial Board member—Professor Philip DayPhilip Day graduated with a PhD degree from the Wolfson Research Laboratories, University of Birmingham, UK. During 1995–1997 at Oxford University he developed very high throughput PCR for the Human Genome Mapping Project, Wellcome Trust. This was followed by novel studies related to high throughput sequencing and gene micro-arrays with Professor Sir Edwin Southern. Later he established a Functional Genomics Unit, at the Kinderspital, University of Zurich. His studies employ innovative strategies to enable precise quantitative measurements of nucleic acids (often incorporating miniaturisation and microfluidics) which are related to meaningful biomedical interpretation. His studies aim to help unravel the complexities of tissue heterogeneity and contribute to the increased applications of systems biology. In 2004 he was elected to Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and in 2006 he was made Principal Investigator at the Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre. Between 2006 and 2007 he was appointed visiting Professor of Applied Molecular Biology and Biochemistry with the Institute for Spectrometry and Spectrochemistry, Dortmund, Germany. He is presently Reader in Quantitative Analytical Genomics, University of Manchester, UK.Editorial Board member—Professor Mehmet TonerProfessor Mehmet Toner is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and also a Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard-Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Division of Health Sciences and Technology. Professor Toner received a Bachelor of Science degree from Istanbul Technical University and a MS degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), both in Mechanical Engineering. Subsequently he completed his PhD degree in Medical Engineering at Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology in 1989. Professor Toner’s research interests include tissue engineering and preservation, and micro/nanosystems in clinical medicine. Professor Toner has received funding from NIH, NSF, DARPA, the Whitaker Foundation, the National Textile Center, and many industrial outfits. Professor Toner serves on the Scientific Advisory Boards of multiple biotechnology and medical device companies as well as being a co-founder of several start-up companies. He has published over 200 scientific publications and has delivered over 350 invited and scientific meeting presentations.Editorial Board member—Professor Luke LeeProfessor Luke P. Lee is the Lloyd Distinguished Professor of Bioengineering at UC Berkeley. He is also Director of the Biomolecular Nanotechnology Center and Co-Director of the Berkeley Sensor & Actuator Center. He was Chair Professor in Systems Nanobiology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH, Zurich). He received both his BA in Biophysics and PhD in Applied Physics/Bioengineering from UC Berkeley. His current research interests are molecular & single cell biophysics, molecular diagnostics, and biologically-inspired photonics–optofluidics–electronics technology and science (BioPOETS) for mobile healthcare systems. Professor Lee has authored and co-authored over 200 papers on nanospectroscopic imaging, bionanophotonics, microfluidic quantitative biology, single cell biology, molecular diagnostics, biologically inspired optofluidic systems, BioMEMS, superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs), SQUID-based biosensors, surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) and bioelectronic nanogap sensors for label-free biomolecular detection.Editorial Board member—Professor John McCarthyJohn McCarthy started his research career studying the biochemistry and biophysics of electron transport-dependent ATP synthesis. In subsequent years as a postdoc and then group leader in Germany, he worked on prokaryotic posttranscriptional control, with a major focus on the diverse set of mechanisms controlling expression of theatpoperon inEscherichia coli. Expression of this operon was found to be regulated by a combination of controls exerted at the levels of translation initiation, translational coupling and mRNA decay, thus enabling correct assembly of a membrane-associated H+–ATPase with the highly complex stoichiometry α3β3γ1δ1ϵ1a1b2c10. Novel principles of posttranscriptional control were elucidated and also applied to various challenges in biotechnology.In the early nineties, the research focus of the McCarthy group switched to posttranscriptional control in eukaryotic systems. Working with bothSaccharomyces cerevisiaeand mammalian cells, the main themes addressed were the mechanisms underlying posttranscriptional control by structural elements (including uORFs, protein-binding sites and aptamer-binding sites) in the untranslated regions of mRNAs, the mechanism of selenocysteine incorporation, the structure and function of eukaryotic initiation factors (eIFs) and of translational regulators, and the structure and function of the yeast ribosome. Highlights have included the discovery of uORF-mediated control of mRNA decay in yeast (including the yeastYAPgenes), quantitative characterization of the influence of phosphorylation on the mechanism of translational regulationvia4E-binding proteins, reports on structurally and functionally novel cap-binding proteins inSchizosaccharomyces pombe, single molecule analysis of the forces and dynamics of ribosomal scanning, a ground breaking 3D reconstruction of the eukaryotic 43S complex (together with Gilbert/Stuart, Oxford), and elucidation of the molecular principles underlying ribosome recruitment to the mRNA 5′ capviathe eIF4F complex (together with Gross/Wagner, Harvard). The McCarthy group has also been active in developing new biophysical and biochemical tools, including SPR methods for studying RNA–protein interactions, and single molecule imaging and manipulation methods for studying the eukaryotic ribosome. Currently, the McCarthy group utilises methods from biophysics, molecular biology and systems biology to study posttranscriptional control in yeast, and has initiated a number of synthetic biology projects in yeast andE. coli.The above work has been published in more than 100 papers in international peer-reviewed journals and has resulted in 5 patents. Professor McCarthy has edited three books and a journal issue (on biophysical techniques in the journalMethods). He has directed or co-directed a series of international conferences (8) and advanced lecture courses (4) on various aspects of the posttranscriptional control of gene expression and quantitative bioscience (funded by NATO Scientific Affairs Division, EMBO, FEBS and industry).While in Germany, he led joint projects with fourteen of the leading biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies in Europe. Since returning to the UK, he has collaborated with Merck and Pfizer, and currently has collaborative projects with Tepnel (Warrington) on developing immobilised ribosome-based assay systems and with Akubio (Cambridge) on applications of biosensor technology.John McCarthy is Chair of the Chemical Biology Interface Forum (and Fellow) of the Royal Society of Chemistry, chairs the Royal Society Grants Committee Board F, and is on the John Innes Centre Governing Council. He was Chair of the Department of Biomolecular Sciences at UMIST (1998–2000). Since 1998, he has led a new initiative to promote research at the interface between bioscience and the physical sciences, engineering and mathematics: the Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre (MIB). He has been Director of the MIB since 2004. The MIB building (£38 million) opened in 2006, and will house up to 75 research groups. Professor McCarthy was the recipient of a Wolfson-Royal Society Merit Award in 2002, and has recently been awarded a BBSRC Professorial Fellowship.Editor, Integration column—Professor Matthias LutolfMatthias P. Lutolf is Assistant Professor and head of the Laboratory of Stem Cell Bioengineering (LSCB) at the EPF Lausanne (since spring 2007). He carried out his PhD studies at the ETH Zurich from 1999 to 2003, where he developed a novel class of biologically responsive synthetic materials for tissue engineering, resulting in several highly cited publications and four internationally issued patents. In 2005, Lutolf joined the Baxter Laboratory in Genetic Pharmacology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He was awarded a Leukemia and Lymphoma Society fellowship (2006) for his research on microenvironmental regulation of hematopoietic stem cells. He recently received a prestigious European Young Investigator (EURYI) award. His current research is focused on developing and utilizing novel technologies to biochemically and structurally deconstructin vivoadult stem cell niches, and reconstruct themin vitro. These well-defined artificial stem cell niches are expected to yield insights into the dynamics of stem cell fate changes in response to extrinsic protein signals, and may spawn new strategies for stem cell-based therapies and tissue engineering.