University lecturer in physics at Oxford University, where he is a fellow of Exeter College, Andrew M. Steane has made central contributions to understanding how the laws of nature place constraints upon, and allow opportunities for, the storage, conveyance, and processing of information. His research involves fundamental questions about the nature of quantum mechanics. Educated at Christ’s Hospital in West Sussex and at St. Edmund’s Hall, Oxford, where he took first class honors in physics, Dr. Steane received his D.Phil. in physics at Oxford in 1991. He was a junior research fellow at Merton College, Oxford, while still a graduate student and then a European post-doctoral fellow at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. He returned to Oxford in 1995 as a Royal Society University Research Fellow based in the Clarendon Laboratory and was associated with St. Edmund Hall as a fellow and a lecturer in physics. He was named to his present positions in 1999. Dr. Steane has been a guest researcher at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a visiting professor at the University of Innsbruck and the University of Ulm. A fellow of the Institute of Physics, he received its Maxwell Medal and Prize in 2000 for his discovery of quantum error correction. His work included not only proofs of the main ideas of one of the foundational concepts of quantum information physics and quantum computing but also explicit constructions of codes and the networks to generate them and to use them to stabilize fragile quantum systems without disturbing their stored quantum information. He is the author of more than forty papers published in scientific journals.