**About the Editors**

#### **Peter Panjan**

Peter Panjan received his PhD in materials sciences at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Technologies, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia). He joined the Jožef Stefan Institute in 1980, where he headed the Department for Thin Films and Surfaces and Hard Coating Center for 13 years. He has almost 40 years of experience in PVD hard coating research, development, and manufacturing. His research group has successfully implemented a number of new hard protective coatings in industrial production. In addition to his primary research topic, he has been active in several other scientific areas related to PVD thin films (depth profiling and diffusion phenomena in multilayer thin films, low-pressure plasma characterization, laser modification of solid surfaces and thin films). He has published over 240 scientific papers, 1 book, 4 chapters in books, and 3 patents. He is also intensively involved in editorial work, as he has been the editor, co-editor, and editorial board member of many scientific journals, and the editor of several books and conference proceedings.

#### **Aljaž Drnovšek**

Aljaž Drnovšek received his PhD in material science from the Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School (Ljubljana, Slovenia). In his thesis, he studied the impact of the surrounding atmosphere and growth defects on the tribological properties of PVD hard coatings. The emphasis of his research was on the influence of surface topography, due to growth defects, on the initial stages of tribological sliding. After his PhD, he was employed at Montanuniversitaet Leoben (Austria) for two years as a post-doc researcher. The focus of his research was on high temperature tribology and the high temperature mechanical properties of CrAlN and CrAlSiN coatings. In the scope of the project, he collaborated with Tomas Polcar's research group in Southampton, UK (engineering materials and surface technology) and prof. Peter Hosemann at the Nuclear Engineering Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2019, he has been employed in the Department of Thin Films and Surfaces at the Jožef Stefan Institute (Slovenia). His current research interest is the nanomechanical characterization of PVD coatings at high temperatures.
