Marvin L. Cohen received an A.B. from UC Berkeley and an M.S. and Ph.D. (1964) from the University of Chicago. He held a postdoctoral position at Bell Laboratories from 1963–64 and in 1964 he joined the physics faculty at Berkeley where he is currently University Professor. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1980), the American Academy of Sciences (1993), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1997) and a Fellow of the American Physical Society (1969). He has held numerous Visiting Professorships and Distinguished Lectureships here and abroad. The most recent were the Hubert M. James Lectureship at Purdue University (1999) and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Distinguished Lectureship (2001). He has been awarded Sloan (1965) and Guggenheim (1978, 1990) Fellowships, Miller Professorships (1969, 1976, 1988), the Buckley (1979) and the Lilienfeld (1994) Prizes of the American Physical Society, the U.S. Department of Energy Awards for Outstanding Accomplishments in Solid State Physics (1981) and for Sustained Outstanding Research (1990), and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Certificate of Merit (1991) and Outstanding Performance Awards (1995). He was chosen to be Faculty Research Lecturer at the University of California 1996–97.