Mark Galassi was born in New york, NY, in 1965. He received the B.S. degree in physics from Reed College, Portland, OR, in 1986 and the Ph.D. degree in theoretical physics from State University of New York, Stony Brook, in 1992. Since then, he has worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, as a Staff Research Scientist. His research interests include general relativity, astrophysics (in particular gamma ray bursts), artificial intelligence and evolutionary computation, software engineering, embedded operating systems, and other areas of physics and computer science.