Jacob Israelachvili received his PhD in Physics in 1972 from the Surface Physics Department of the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, England. After a two-year European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) research fellowship at the University of Stockholm, he left for Australia where, from 1974 to 1986, he lead an experimental research laboratory devoted to measuring the forces between surfaces and in 1982 he was elected a member of the Australian Academy of Science. In 1986 he joined the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara where he holds joint appointments as Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, the Materials Department and the Biomolecular Science and Engineering Department. He was the Associate Director of the Materials Research Laboratory at UCSB from 1993 until 2003. His many awards include the AIChE Alpha Chi Sigma Award, the Adhesion Society Award for Excellence in Adhesion Science, the ACS National Award in Colloid and Surface Chemistry and the MRS Medal. Jacob is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the Royal Society of London. He is also a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and of the US National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of a textbook entitled "Intermolecular and Surface Forces" (Academic Press, 3rd Edition: 2010) for which he was awarded the AIChE Walker Award for Excellence in contributions to Chemical Engineering literature. He was recently named by the AIChE in a list of aoeOne Hundred Chemical Engineers of the Modern Eraa, elected to the fellowship of the American Academy of Science (AAAS), and received the world's highest award in tribology, the 2013 Tribology Gold Medal Award, for pioneering contributions to the technology and science of friction and wear.