Prof. Jean-Marie DUBOIS is a distinguished director of research at CNRS, professor at Dalian University of Technology (PR China) and at the Jožef Stefan Post-graduate School in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He was the founding and first director of Institut Jean Lamour in Nancy, the largest public research laboratory dedicated to materials science and engineering in France. He was awarded the prestigious Robert Franklin Mehl Award by the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society in the USA in 2007. He owns a doctorate in physics from Polytechnic Institute of Lorraine and was elected a fellow of Churchill College during the period 1982-84 when he was a researcher at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, UK.