Bernd Sturmfels received doctoral degrees in Mathematics in 1987 from the University of Washington in Seattle and TU Darmstadt. After two postdoctoral years in Minneapolis and Linz he taught at Cornell University before joining UC Berkeley in 1995, where he is Professor of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science. His honors include a National Young Investigator Fellowship, a Sloan Fellowship, a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship, a Clay Senior Scholarship, an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Prize, and the SIAM von Neumann Lectureship. Recently he ser­ved as Vice President of the American Mathematical Society. A leading experimentalist among mathematicians, Sturmfels has authored or edited 15 books and 190 research articles in the areas of combinatorics, algebraic geometry, polyhedral geometry, symbolic computation and their applica­tions. His current research focuses on algebraic methods in optimization, statistics and computational biology.