Les Schmerr received a B.S. degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1965 and a Ph.D. in Mechanics from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1970. Since 1969 he has been at Iowa State University where he is currently Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Associate Director of the Center for Nondestructive Evaluation. He is also the Permanent Secretary of the World Federation of NDE Centers. His research interests include ultrasonics, elastic wave propagation and scattering, and artificial intelligence. He has developed and taught Ultrasonics and Nondestructive Evaluation courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level. He is the author of several books, including Ultrasonic Nondestructive Evaluation Systems (2007), Fundamentals of Ultrasonic Phased Arrays (2015), and most recently, the second edition of Fundamentals of Ultrasonic Nondestructive Evaluation (2016). He is a member of IEEE, ASME, ASNT and AIAA.