A professor of physics at Rutgers University, Michael R. Douglas is director of the university’s New High Energy Theory Center. His research focus is on string theory, as a theory of fundamental interactions and quantum gravity, on non-perturbative methods in field theory, and on the relations of these fields with mathematics. His best-known works include the first non-perturbative formulations of string theory and pioneering studies of the stringy geometry of “branes,” which led to the discovery of noncommutative field theory arising within string theory. A graduate of Harvard University, he earned his Ph.D. in physics at Caltech in 1988. He was an Enrico Fermi Fellow at the University of Chicago before coming to Rutgers as a research associate in 1990 and joining the physics faculty as an assistant professor the next year. Dr. Douglas was named to his present position in 2000. He has been a visiting researcher at ENS in Paris, the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The Gordon Moore Visiting Scholar at Caltech last year, he has held the Louis Michel Visiting Professorship at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifique in Bures-sur-Yvette, France, since 1999. He is a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University. The recipient of an Alfred J. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, and the Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences, he also has been a Clay Mathematical Institute Mathematical Emissary. Dr. Douglas, who presently serves as editor of Communications in Mathematical Physics, is a former editor of the Journal of High Energy Physics and continues to serve on its advisory board. The author of more than ninety articles in scientific journals, he is the co-editor (with Costas Bachas, Adel Bilal, N. A. Nekrasov, and Francois David) of Unity from Duality: Gravity, Gauge Theory and Strings, which was published by Springer in 2002.