Hrvoje Petek is the R. K. Mellon Chair of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh. He studied Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (B.S. 1980) and the University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D. 1985). He was a Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Associate at the Institute for Molecular Science (1985–1993), and Group Leader at the Hitachi Advanced Research Laboratory (1993–2000) in Japan. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of Progress in Surface Science. In 2009 he was recognized as an Outstanding Referee by the American Physical Society. His research interests span ultrafast spectroscopy, microscopy, and femtochemistry of solid surfaces. He pioneered ultrafast multiphoton photoemission studies of coherent electron dynamics on the femtosecond temporal and nanometer spatial scales.http://www.ultrafast.phyast.pitt.edu/Home.html