Lior Pachter is Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his PhD in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999. He then moved to the mathematics department at UC Berkeley where he was a postdoctoral researcher for two years, before being hired as an assistant professor. He has been awarded an NSF Career award, and has received the Sloan Fellowship for his work on molecular biology and evolution. Equally at home amongst both mathematicians and biologists, he has published over 40 research articles in areas ranging from combinatorics to gene finding, and has participated in several large genome projects.