A professor of mechanical engineering and engineering systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Seth Lloyd is interested in the role information plays in physical systems, particularly systems in the quantum realm. He is a principal investigator at the Research Laboratory of Electronics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and an adjunct professor at The Santa Fe Institute. He works on problems having to do with how physical systems register information and move it about, how information is transferred and processed, and, most importantly, how the ways in which a system transfers and transforms information determine its behavior. His pioneering research in the fields of quantum computation and quantum communications resulted in the first technologically feasible design for a quantum computer, and he also has demonstrated the viability of quantum analog computation, proven quantum analogs of Claude Shannon’s noisy channel theorem, and designed novel methods for quantum error correction and noise reduction. A graduate of Harvard College, Dr. Lloyd studied mathematics and philosophy of science at Cambridge University on a Marshall Scholarship, and then earned a Ph.D. in physics at The Rockefeller University in 1988. He held post-doctoral fellowships at the California Institute of Technology and at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Joining the MIT faculty as an assistant professor of mechanical engineering in 1984, he was promoted to associate professor in 1988 and named to his present position in 2002. He has delivered numerous invited lectures throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. His teaching and research has been recognized by a Lindbergh Fellowship, the 1985 Dirac Prize (Erice) given by the Institute of Physics, a Finmeccanica Career Development Professorship, and, most recently, MIT’s 2001 Edgerton Prize. The author or co-author of more than 120 papers published in scientific journals, his first book, Programming the Universe, which was published earlier this year by Random House, argues that the universe is a system whose specific details and structures are created when quantum bits de-cohere—choose one path out of multiple possibilities—and that this process is identical to quantum computation.