Steven Bell is Professor of Physical Chemistry and Director of Research for the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Queen’s University, Belfast. His work centres on the use laser based spectroscopy (particularly Raman spectroscopy) for fundamental studies of both molecular and nanostructured materials as well as real world uses of spectroscopy for biomedical, pharmaceutical, forensic and security applications. He has published 139 refereed research papers and book chapters with an H-index of 36 (Web of Science). He was founder/director (2001) of Avalon Instruments, a spin-out company manufacturing analytical instruments which grew to be a multi-million dollar business before being sold to Perkin-Elmer (a global scale instrumentation company) in 2006. He currently holds research grants from the EU, EPSRC, MRC and the Dept. of Justice.