BING YAN, PhD, was born in China and received his PhD in chemistry at Columbia University in 1990. He then worked at Cambridge University and the University of Texas-Houston Medical School as a postdoctoral fellow. From 1993 to 1999, he worked for Novartis in the Core Technologies area of preclinical research in New Jersey. He is currently at the Discovery Chemistry division of Discovery Partners International, Inc., in San Francisco. His major research interests are drug discovery, optimization of solid-phase and solution-phase combinatorial synthesis, high-throughput quantitative and qualitative analysis, and high-throughput purification of combinatorial libraries. He has written four books and published over seventy reviews and research articles.