Len Pismen is professor emeritus at Israel Institute of Technology where he held the Julius M. and Bernice Naiman Chair in Fluid Mechanics. He has published two monographs - Vortices in Nonlinear Fields: From liquid crystals to superfluids, From non-equilibrium patterns to cosmic strings (Oxford University Press, 1999), Patterns and Interfaces in Dissipative Dynamics (Springer, 2006) - and is member of the editorial board of The European Physical Journal Special Topics .