Rees Rawlings became Emeritus Professor on 1st October 2007. This special section celebrates his long and distinguished research career and, in particular, his contributions as Editor of the Journal of Materials Science. Rees’ research interests have been especially broad (which is so appropriate for an Editor of such a multidisciplinary journal) and have included: structural ceramics, metallic alloys, biomaterials, glass-ceramics and composites. These interests are reflected in the contributions to this Festschrift special issue. Indeed it is indicative of the esteem in which he is held that many of the papers were received from Rees’ former colleagues, students and collaborators.

The special section starts with a retrospective of Rees’ career written by his long-term colleague Prof. W. Bonfield. Following this, the first two papers by Wilshire et al. and Abaszadeh et al. are concerned with mechanical properties and applications of metallic alloys. The second group of papers in this special issue cover several topics in the field of composite materials, including ceramic and glass matrix composites in the papers of Kim et al., Dlouhy et al., He and Ponton and Hauser et al., which deal with aspects of the processing and microstructure-property correlation in these materials. Metal and polymer matrix composites are considered in the contributions of Morsi et al. and Thamae et al., respectively. High temperature ceramics and refractory materials, which have also been the subject of Rees’ interest in his distinguished career, are the themes of the contributions by Boussuge, D. N. Boccaccini et al., Amsellem et al., Yuan et al., Aduda et al. and Kastritseas et al., while Biasetto et al. and Bretcanu et al. discuss porous ceramics for functional and biomedical applications, respectively. The final three papers completing this section consider further research areas of Rees’ significant contributions, those of glass-ceramics and waste recycling materials, covered in the papers by Romero et al., Dimech et al. and Michie et al.

We are proud to have had the opportunity of guest-editing this Festschrift in the Journal of Materials Science to honour the prestigious career of Rees Rawlings, our colleague and friend, and hope that the variety of topics covered and the quality of the contributions are a fitting tribute to the impressive contribution of Rees to the materials science international community.

London, 11th March 2008