His current professional responsibilities include: Trustee of AIME; Past President of TMS-AIME; Past President of the Industrial Research Institute; Member of the Board of Directors of Martin Marietta Energy Systems; Member of the Visiting Committee to the National Institute for Standards and Technology; Member of the National Critical Technologies Panel (Office of Science and Technology Policy); Chairman of Advisory Panel to the National Science Foundations's (NSF) Directorate on Science, Technology and International Affairs; and Chairman of the National Research Council's (NRC) Commission on Engineering and Technical Systems.

James E. Armstrong III, Senior Partner, Armstrong, Nikaido, Marmelstein, Murray and Kubovcik, Washington, D.C., has been involved in the practice of patent law for more then 36 years. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering in 1951 from Michigan State University and an LL.B. from the University of Maryland School of Law in 1957. He was registered to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 1956 and was admitted to the Maryland bar in 1957 and the District of Columbia bar in 1970.

Mr. Armstrong is fluent in Japanese and has spent two to four months in Japan each year for the past 21 years on patent and licensing matters.

Mr. Armstrong is a member of the American Bar Association, the American Intellectual Property Association, the U.S. Trademark Association, the Licensing Executives Society, and the American Group of the Association Internationale pour la Protection de la Propriete Industrielle (AIPPI).

His publications include The Japanese—Successful Patent, Know-How and Joint Venture Relations, with Levine, Richman and Seward, Patent Resources Group (1973, 1974), The Thought Process—Essentials for the Drafting of U.S. Patent Specifications and Claims, by Armstrong and Nikaido, Japan Group AIPPI (1975); Revised Editions (1980), (1986) Fundamentals of Technology Transfer, Pegan and Armstrong (1991) and several articles in les Nouvelles (the Journal of the Licensing Executives Society) on the cultural impact of Japanese-American licensing negotiations.

Mr. Armstrong has served as a lecturer and instructor with the Patent Resources Group (Directed by Professor Irving Kayton of George Mason University) since 1973. He has also been a guest lecturer at the World Trade Institute in New York on antitrust and licensing matters on several occasions since 1978, and has presented several lectures and workshops at meetings of the Licensing Executives Society. Over the past 21 years, Mr. Armstrong has given more than 100 lectures and seminars (usually in Japanese) to numerous Japanese corporations, Japanese patent associations, and professional societies on a wide variety of topics relating to patents and