NIGEL GOLDENFELD holds a Swanlund Endowed Chair and is a Center for Advanced Study professor in physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He is the director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute for Universal Biology at UIUC, and leads the Biocomplexity Group at the University's Institute for Genomic Biology.
Goldenfeld received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge (U.K.) in 1982, and for the years 1982-1985 was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California at Santa Barbara. He has been an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, a University Scholar of the University of Illinois, a recipient of the Xerox Award for research, and a recipient of the A. Nordsieck award for excellence in graduate teaching. He serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and Physical Biology. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences.