This twelfth volume of Annual Review of Heat Transfer marks the beginning of an expanded editorial team that is committed to maintaining the fine tradition of this series by providing improved and timely communications on new and important developments in the field of heat transfer. The theory and practice of heat transfer have been significantly broadened in recent years, particularly in biomedical engineering and biotechnology, micro- and nano-technologies, energy-efficient processes and systems, and in materials technologies such as laser and plasma processing. While continuing to feature advancements in the fundamentals of heat transfer, the editors will give special attention to presenting state-of-the-art reviews on topics of interest in such rapidly evolving areas of technology. The present volume starts with a review of the advances and challenges in micro and miniaturized heat pipes, which are being used for heat dissipation in many modern communication and computing systems. The second article deals with heat transfer in low energy plasmas used for microelectronic manufacturing, while the third article reviews heat transfer and phase-change during high-power, pulsed laser ablation of metals, as in thin film deposition, micro-machining and the synthesis of nanomaterials. Processing of thermoplastic, matrix composite materials, which involves complex, multi-scale heat and mass transfer, is considered in the fourth article, the next two articles deal with heat transfer in crystal growth, a precursor for electronic and opto-electronic device fabrication. The first of these articles treats convective instabilities under various growth conditions, while the second article considers the effects of an applied magnetic field on growth phenomena, associated hydrodynamics and the control of flow instability. The last article of this volume reviews the fundamentals of interferometric tomography and application of the technique to three-dimensional temperature measurement. The editors would like to thank the participating authors for their valuable contributions, to Begell House for editorial assistance, to Nancy Hughes of UC Berkeley and Alina Stroia of SUNY Stony Brook for their secretarial help, and to the thermal science and processing community for their continued support and input.