Elinor Ostrom is Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science at Indiana University and founding co-director of the university’s Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. She also serves as founding director of the new Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity at Arizona State University. An expert on collective action and the management of shared resources, she has focused her scholarly attention on the integration of research findings in the cognitive sciences into a workable set of models for exploring and explaining human choices in various institutional settings. A graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles, where she earned a baccalaureate degree with honors and took her Ph.D. in political science in 1965, Dr. Ostrom spent a year as a visiting assistant professor of government at Indiana University before accepting appointment to the permanent faculty. She was promoted to associate professor of political science in 1969 and named a full professor in 1974. She chaired the political science department for four years and served as co-director of the Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change at Indiana for a decade. Dr. Ostrom also has served as president of the Midwest Political Science Association, the American Political Science Association (APSA), the Public Choice Society, and the International Association for the Study of Common Property, as well as on the advisory boards of numerous scholarly and governmental organizations. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, she is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the American Philosophical Society. She holds honorary degrees from the University of Zurich, the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, Luleå University of Technology in Sweden, the University of Michigan, Sweden’s Uppsala University, and Humboldt University in Berlin. Among her many other honors are the APSA’s James Madison Award, the Sustainability Science Award of the Ecological Society of America, the NAS’s John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science, a Lifetime Achievement Award given by the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, Uppsala University’s Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, the Thomas R. Dye Service Award, the Miriam Mills Award, the Donald Campbell Award of Policy Studies Organization, the Frank E. Seidman Distinguished Award in Political Economy, and the Harold and Margaret Sprout Award given by the International Studies Association. Dr. Ostrom has served on the editorial boards of nineteen academic journals. The winner last year of a Cozzarelli Prize for a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, she has published some 245 articles and chapters in volumes of collected works. She is the editor or co-editor of eighteen books, including (with Robert Keohane) Local Commons and Global Interdependence: Heterogeneity and Cooperation in Two Domains (1995), (with James Walker) Trust and Reciprocity: Interdisciplinary Lessons from Experimental Research (2003), (with T. K. Ahn) Foundations of Social Capital (2003), (with Basudeb Guha-Khasnobis and Ravi Kanbur) Linking the Formal and Informal Economy: Concepts and Policies (2006), and, most recently, (with Charlotte Hess) Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice, which was published by the MIT Press earlier this year. Dr. Ostrom also is the author or co-author of another ten books. They include Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990), an examination of shared ownership of natural resources, and Understanding Institutional Diversity (2005), a study that uses game theory to understand the analysis of diverse economic, political, and social institutions.