Philippe J. Roussel received the diploma in electrical engineering from the Industriële Hogeschool of Ghent, Belgium (1983). His first job with SIEMENS AG at the Oostkamp site involved IEEE controlled instrumentation. In 1984, he joined the ESAT lab of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium as an assistant in a reliability research project on plastic encapsulation, where he developed several programs for the analysis of test failure data. From 1987, he assisted in a government funded project on electromigration in the Analysis and Reliability Group of the Materials and Packaging division of the Interuniversity Micro-Electronics Center (IMEC), Leuven, Belgium. 1991-2000, he worked on analysis techniques like microprobe, TEM and Spectroscopic Ellipsometry in the STDI/MCA group, while continuing his research on Reliability Statistics, Statistical Process Control and Data Analyis in the STDI/TRY group. He co-authored papers in fields as diverse as handheld calculator programming, virology, Spectroscopic Ellipsometry, ESD, and oxide and interconnect reliability. He designed a maximum likelihood fitting program for the assessment of statistical distributions of reliability data that is now commercialized as FAILURE.