Teddy Asefa was born in Ethiopia where he also completed his B.Sc. degree in Chemistry with distinction in 1992 from Addis Ababa University. He worked on isolation and characterization of flavonoid natural products from flowers as an undergraduate student there. He then came to the United States as a Fulbright Scholar in 1996 to do his graduate study. After a brief stay at the University of Delaware, he joined the Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics (ILPB) at the State University of New York at Buffalo to complete his M.Sc. in Chemistry in 1998 and worked with Professor Paras N. Prasad. Teddy, then, went to Toronto, Canada to complete his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto in 2002 with Professor Geoffrey A. Ozin. While at Toronto he has co-invented new classes of nanocomposite materials called Periodic Mesoporous Organosilicas (PMOs) that are currently drawing wide range of interest world-wide. He was then an invited Miller Fellowship nominee by Professor Peidong Yang at the University of California at Berkeley and a post-doctoral fellow at McGill University with Professor R. Bruce Lennox. Teddy has then joined the faculty at Syracuse University in the summer of 2005 as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry where he is currently involved in the development of synthetic methods to a wide array of functional nanomaterials and the investigation of their potential applications in catalysis, targeted delivery of drugs at specific cells, nanocytotoxicity, solar-cells, and environmental remediation. He currently holds an NSF CAREER Award, is a recipient of multiple federal and local research grants and also serves as a panelist for several federal and international agencies.