Henry J. Curran received his PhD degree in 1994 from NUIG in experimental and numerical studies of combustion kinetics. He served as a research scientist in combustion modelling from 1994 to 1999 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California (LLNL). In 1999, he returned to Ireland as a lecturer in Physical Chemistry at Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology while continuing to consult with LLNL and performing collaborative research at NUIG from 2001 to 2005. He was appointed as a lecturer in Physical Chemistry in NUIG in October 2005, became a Senior Lecturer in 2009 and was promoted to professor in 2013. He was awarded a DSc by Research from the National University of Ireland in October 2011. He became a member of the Royal Irish Academy in May 2015. He is on the editorial board of the Proceedings of Combustion Institute and Progress in Energy and Combustion Science and a past member of the editorial board of Combustion and Flame. Prof Curran has been named by Thomson Reuters (now Clarivate) as being among the top 1% of researchers cited in his field worldwide for the past four years (2014-2017). He was awarded the Boyle Higgins gold medal for Chemistry by the Institute of Chemistry in Ireland in April 2017.