**About the Editor**

**Rui Tamura** (Professor Emeritus of Kyoto University) became a professor of the Department of Interdisciplinary Environment, Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies at Kyoto University in 2002, from which he retired in 2018. His research fields cover synthetic and structural organic chemistry, organic crystal and liquid crystal chemistry, as well as colloidal, magnetic and chiral chemistry. His current research interests focus on the discovery of novel complexity phenomena occurring upon the phase transition of organic crystals and in liquid crystals under nonequilibrium conditions. It should be stressed that the observed unusual phenomena cannot be reproduced in ordinary equilibrium systems. To date, two novel phenomena have been discovered: "preferential enrichment" is a unique spontaneous enantiomeric resolution phenomenon observed upon the recrystallization of certain types of racemic organic crystals and cocrystals; while the "magneto-LC effect" refers to the generation of unique superparamagnetic domains in liquid crystalline phases of organic nitroxide radical compounds in low magnetic fields. Professor Tamura completed his Ph.D. at the Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, at Kyoto University in 1980, and took two post-doctoral research fellowships at the Department of Chemistry at Colorado State university (1980–1981) and Princeton University (1982) in the USA. He has undertaken faculty positions in chemistry at the National Defense Academy (1983–1987), Ehime University (1988–1994), Hokkaido University (1995–1996) and Kyoto University (1997–2018) in Japan.
