Richard Claus received degrees from the Johns Hopkins University. For more than 30 years, he served on the engineering faculty at Virginia Tech where he taught electrical engineering and materials science, founded and directed the Fiber & Electro-Optics Research Center, and most recently held the Lewis A. Hester Chair of Engineering. Claus left Virginia Tech in January 2007 to work full-time at NanoSonic, a small spinoff from the Virginia Tech Colleges of Science and Engineering. He has received the ASME/AIAA Adaptive Structures Prize for work on actively controlled aircraft wings, the ASCE Normal Medal for work in active structural control, the IEEE Centennial Medal, and an SPIE Lifetime Achievement Award. He co-founded and served as co-Editor-in-Chief of the Institute of Physics journal Smart Materials and Structures from 1993 to 2007. Claus has published more than 1,000 related journal and conference papers, and 30 issued patents.