Enrico Gratton received his doctorate in physics in 1969 from the University of Rome. In 1986, while a Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Gratton was awarded a grant from the National Institutes of Health to establish the first national facility dedicated to fluorescence spectroscopy: the Laboratory for Fluorescence Dynamics (LFD). The LFD is a state-of-the-art fluorescence laboratory for use by local, national, and international scientists. It is committed to service in a user-oriented facility, as well as to research and development of fluorescence instrumentation and theory. The LFD has reached international recognition for the development of instrumentation for time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy using frequency domain methods. In 2006 the entire LFD laboratory moved to its current location at the new Natural Sciences II building at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Gratton remains Principal Investigator of the LFD and holds joint appointments as Professor in the UCI departments of Biomedical Engineering and Physics, and also in the College of Medicine. Dr. Gratton collaborates with other UCI researchers in the areas of engineering, medicine, physical science, information and computer science, biological science, and UCI's Beckman Laser Institute (BLI).