David E. Goldberg, a leader in the field of genetic algorithms, is the Jerry S. Dobrovolny Distinguished Professor in Entrepreneurial Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne. He is also the co-founder and chief scientist of Nextumi, Inc., a web startup company. Trained as a civil engineer at the University of Michigan, where he earned his B.S.E. and took his Ph.D. in 1983, Dr. Goldberg, who had previously worked for the U.S. Geological Survey and in private industry, joined the Michigan faculty as a lecturer on receiving his doctorate. He moved on to the University of Alabama as an assistant professor of engineering mechanics in 1984 and was promoted to associate professor three years later. In 1990, he joined the Illinois faculty and was named a professor of general engineering in 1993. He was appointed to his current chair three years ago. Dr. Goldberg has been a Prater Exchange Professor at National Taiwan University, a visiting scholar at Stanford University, a visiting scholar and Gambrinus Fellow at the University of Dortmund in Germany, and a visiting professor at Tsukuba University in Japan. The founding chair of the International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, he is a former chair of the International Society for Genetic Algorithms. Among many honors, he is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, a Wickenden Award presented by the American Society for Engineering Education, and an Outstanding Instructor Award presented by the National Technological University. In addition to articles in professional journals, he is the author of two books on genetic algorithms, the widely-cited Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization, and Machine Learning (1989) and The Design of Innovation (2002), and, most recently, The Entrepreneurial Engineer, which was published earlier this year by Wiley.