Lance Fortnow received his Ph.D. under Michael Sipser in Applied Mathematics at MIT in 1989. Before Northwestern he spent his academic career at the University of Chicago with the exception of a senior research scientist position at the NEC Research Institute from 1999 to 2003. In 1992 he received the NSF Presidential Faculty Fellowship and was a Fulbright Scholar visiting CWI in Amsterdam 1996-97. Fortnow studies computational complexity and its applications to electronic commerce, quantum computation, bioinformatics, learning theory and cryptography. His early work on interactive proofs precipitated the development of probabilistically checkable proofs and inapproximability theory. Fortnow co-writes the popular scientific and academic weblog Computational Complexity.