Oleg Prezhdo was born in Kharkov, Ukraine in 1970. He obtained Diploma in Theoretical Chemistry with Honors from Kharkov National University in 1991. His thesis work was on focused on the optical properties of molecules and was performed under supervision of Prof. Anatoly Luzanov. From 1991 to 1993, he developed a for interaction of molecules with liquids, guided by Prof. Stanislav Tyurin in Kharkov Polytechnic University. Having moved to USA in the fall of 1993, he completed his PhD on chemical reaction dynamics in solution under Peter Rossky at UT-Austin in 1997. After a brief postdoctoral fellowship with John Tully at Yale, where he worked on electron transfer at surfaces, he moved to the University of Washington in Seattle in 1998. In 2002, he was promoted to Associate Professor and in 2005 to Full Professor. In 2008 he became a Senior Editor of the Journal of Physical Chemistry. In 2010 Oleg Prezhdo was offered and accepted a Senior Professorship position at the University of Rochester. Oleg Prezhdo is married to Marina Prezhdo since 1990. They have 2 children: Eugenia born in 1991, and Natalie born in 2004. Oleg Prezhdo’s research interests range from the fundamental aspects of chemical reaction dynamics in gas phase, solution and on surfaces, optical properties of molecules and energy losses to heat, to the applied problems in energy harvesting and storage, molecular electronics and computing, lasers, flat screen displays, electro-optic polymers, protein-protein interactions in biology, etc.