Leszek A. Utracki, PhD, 1931-2012, was a Senior Research Officer at the National Research Council of Canada, Industrial Materials Institute and a former adjunct professor at McGill University, Department of Chemical Engineering, in Montreal, Quebec. He was also the author and/or editor of twenty-one books and has written forty-eight book chapters, hundreds of referenced and non-referenced journal articles and meeting proceedings. Professor Charles Wilkie received his B.S. degree from the University of Detroit and Ph.D. from Wayne State University. He is an editor of Polymers for Advanced Technologies and serves on the editorial boards of Polymer Degradation and Stability and Thermochimica Acta. In 1992  Professor Wilkie was recipient of the ACS Milwaukee Section Award. He was a Fulbright-Hays scholar at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles in 1991-92. In 2007 he received the Marquette University Award for Excellence in Research.  He is one of the organizers of the American Chemical Society Meeting on Fire retardancy, held every four years and he has taught a number of short courses on fire retardancy.