Pall Thordarson (Palli), currently Professor in the School of Chemistry at UNSW Sydney (The University of New South Wales), was born on a farm in Vopnafjörður in the north-east of Iceland. He obtained his BSc. from the University of Iceland in 1996 and a PhD in Organic Chemistry from the University of Sydney, Australia in 2001 under the supervision of Maxwell Crossley. Following a Marie Curie Fellowship in the laboratory of Roeland Nolte and Alan Rowan at the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands, he returned to the University Sydney in 2003 and was then appointed at the School of Chemistry, UNSW in 2007 as a senior lecturer. He was promoted to a position of Full Professor in 2017. Palli has published close to 100 papers (over 3700 citations) and received a number of awards for his work including The International JPP/SPP Young Investigator Award in 2010 and the 2012 Le Fèvre Memorial Prize from the Australian Academy of Science for outstanding basic research in Chemistry by a Scientist under the age of 40. Palli’s main research activities are currently on complexity in chemistry and functional nanomaterials, including light-harvesting dyes, self-assembled materials for nanomedicine, supramolecular equilibria and systems chemistry.