Ullrich Steiner is the John Humphrey Plummer Professor of the Physics of Materials at the Cavendsh Laboratory, Department of Physics of University of Cambridge. He is a fellow of St. Edmunds College, Cambridge and a fellow the Royal Society of Chemistry. In 2002, Hhe was awarded the 2002 Raymond and Beverley Sackler Prize in the Physics Sciences. He is the current Chairman of the Editorial Board of the RSC journal “Soft Matter”. His areas of research include the physics of pattern formation on surfaces and in thin films, the properties of polymer in confinement, the synthesis of inorganic materials in self-assembled organic templates, the control of the nanometer morphologies in organic and dyes sensitised solar cells, and biomimetic formation of sub-micrometre morphologies.