Robert Axelrod, the Mary Ann and Charles R. Walgreen Professor for the Study of Human Understanding at the University of Michigan, is widely known for his research in mathematical modeling, international security affairs, and complexity theory. His principal current interests are in the emergent properties of social systems and in the political and social effects of the information revolution. An honors graduate of the University of Chicago, he earned his Ph.D. in political science with distinction at Yale University in 1969. He then joined the political science faculty of the University of California at Berkeley as an assistant professor, a post he held until moving to the University of Michigan in 1974 as an associate professor of political science and a research associate of the Institute of Public Policy Studies. Promoted to professor of political science and public policy six years later, he was named Arthur W. Bromage Distinguished University Professor in 1987 and awarded his present chair last year. Dr. Axelrod has been a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the American Philosophical Society, and the Council on Foreign Affairs, he has held a Council on Foreign Relations Fellowship and a National Science Foundation NATO Fellowship and has been a recipient of a MacArthur Prize, a Franklin L. Burdette Pi Sigma Alpha Award, a NAS Award for Behavioral Research Relevant to the Prevention of Nuclear War, and a number of honors from the University of Michigan, including a Russell Lectureship, a Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award, and an Excellence in Research Award. Dr. Axelrod has been a Germeshausen Distinguished Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management and received honorary degrees from Yale University and Georgetown University. He is the author of more than sixty articles published in scholarly journals or as chapters in volumes of collected works, several of which have won prizes, the editor of two books, and the author or co-author of five others, including Conflict of Interest: A Theory of Divergent Goals with Applications to Politics (1970), Framework for a General Theory of Cognition and Choice (1972), The Evolution of Cooperation (1985), The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration (1997), and, most recently, (with Michael D. Cohen) Harnessing Complexity: Organizational Implications of a Scientific Frontier, which was published by the Free Press in 2000 and has been praised for providing business leaders with expert guidance into how natural innovation occurs and how to exploit its power.