Born in New York City, Prof. Lee Smolin was educated at Hampshire College and Harvard University. He was formerly a professor at Yale, Syracuse and Penn State Universities and held postdoctoral positions at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Santa Barbara and the Enrico Fermi Institute, the University of Chicago. He has been a visiting professor at Imperial College London and has held various visiting positions at Oxford and Cambridge Universities and the Universities of Rome and Trento, and SISSA, in Italy. Since 2001, he has been a founding and senior faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Prof. Smolin works mainly on the problem of quantum gravity. He also has contributed to cosmology, the foundations of quantum mechanics, astrophysics, theoretical biology, philosophy of science and, recently, economics.