I'd like to introduce you to Dr. David Dunn. Starting this month, Dave will head up our Q&A department, a.k.a. "Ask Dr. Dave."

Dave currently holds the position of senior associate, bms North America, Wilmington, Del., and Aurora, Ohio. These are the U.S. offices of bms AG, an international consulting and industrial market-research company headquartered in Zug, Switzerland. The company specializes in technical and market research and evaluation with a focus on adhesives, coatings, sealants, chemicals, polymers and elastomers in application areas that include automotive, building and construction, and chemical.

Dave is a research professional with a diverse background in both industrial and academic circles. Having started his career in the synthetic-rubber industry, he then progressed from a bench chemist to a vice president of Loctite Corp., and has pioneered the development of several new technologies and many significant new products.

Achievements have included managing the New Business Development and R&D functions of Loctite's Automotive and Consumer Group, a $100-million division, where he spearheaded the development of new products whose fifth-year sales were 35% of corporate sales. He has also managed a specialty adhesives company selling high-performance systems for a wide range of product-assembly operations.

Dave has consulted for many large corporations in both a technical and managerial capacity, including Becton Dickinson, Baxter Corp., Shell Chemical, TRW, Ciba-Geigy, Reilly Industries and Allied Chemical. He has also carried out several technical market-research studies for large corporations in specialty chemicals, elastomers and plastics.

Author of numerous publications, book chapters and patents, Dave is an acknowledged world expert on acrylic and cyanoacrylate adhesives. Other technical experience has been in epoxies, hot melt adhesives, UV systems, silicones and vacuum impregnation.

"Married with children" (teenagers), Dave admits to a fanatic interest in soccer. He has coached club teams and high school, including a national champion team in 1998. So, be sure to check out Dr. Dave's column on page 126, and feel free to send him your questions about adhesives . . . and soccer!

Right to the Source for ASI 50

In our last issue, we published the ASI 50, our fourth annual listing of the country's largest adhesives and sealants manufacturers. We feel quite confident in the accuracy of the listing. We went right to the source.

There are 63 companies in our listing, including honorable mentions that fall short of the top 50. There are only two companies that we were unable to make direct contact with to obtain sales figures. In these cases, we used information from other sources to determine that they should be included and repeated their sales figures from last year.

We respected the wishes of approximately 38% of the companies who did not want their sales figures published, even though they shared them with us. With such a large percentage of companies that could not be ranked, we decided to list the companies alphabetically rather than by sales figures, as we have in the past.

The ASI 50 is now on our Web site, www.adhesivesmag.com. If you feel your company belongs in our listing, please contact Kristin Johansson at johanssonk@bnp.com.