David C. Krakauer is chair of the faculty and a research professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His research focuses on the evolutionary history of information processing mechanisms in adaptive systems. It spans levels of organization that includes genetics, cell biology, microbiology, and society. The current emphasis of his work is on robust information transmission and signaling dynamics, particularly their role in constructing novel, higher level structures, such as social systems and language. A graduate of the University of London, where he went on to earn a master’s degree in computer science and mathematics, Dr. Krakauer received his D.Phil. in evolutionary theory from Oxford University in 1995. He remained at Oxford as a postdoctoral research fellow, and two years later was named a Wellcome Research Fellow in mathematical biology and lecturer at Pembroke College. In 1999, he accepted an appointment to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and served as visiting professor of evolution at Princeton University. He moved on to the Santa Fe Institute as a professor three years later and was made faculty chair in 2009. Dr. Krakauer has been a visiting fellow at the Genomics Frontiers Institute at the University of Pennsylvania and a Sage Fellow at the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of Santa Barbara. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health as well as by Lockheed Martin and several private foundations. A member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Theoretical Biology, Theory in Biosciences, Biology Digest, Interdisciplinary Science Review, Springer’s Monographs in Mathematical Biology, and Primers in Complex Systems, a series published by the SFI and Princeton University Press, he is the author of more than eighty papers published in scientific journals and the co-editor of Protocells: Transitions from Non-living to Living Matter, an account of current approaches to making new forms of life in the laboratory, which was published in 2008 by MIT Press. He is completing two new books, Adaptive Information Theory (for the SFI PUP Primer series), and (with Dan Rockmore) TranScience: The New Ideas and Education Revolution.