Georges Belfort holds the endowed Institute Chair at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He got a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Cape Town in South Africa and graduate degrees from the University of California, Irvine. He designed the first water reuse system for NASA’s test spacecraft and worked on fuel cells and on reverse osmosis at McDonnell Douglas’s Astropower Laboratory from 1964 to 1970. He was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering in 2003, and he is a past President and co-founder of The North American Membrane Society (NAMs). He has published over 250 peer-reviewed publications, 25 book chapters, and 10 assigned patents in separations science, biotechnology, health sciences, and transport phenomena. Belfort has served on the scientific advisory board for the Max Planck Institute for Complex Systems, Magdeburg, Germany and for the Chinese Academy of Sciences as a member of the Assessment Committee of the Institute of Process Engineering in Beijing. He is currently on the scientific advisory board of the Alexander Grass Center for Bioengineering at Hebrew University in Israel.