Reinhard Genzel received his Ph.D. from the University of Bonn (FRG) in 1978. He came to Berkeley as a Miller Fellow in 1980 and joined the Physics Department faculty as Associate Professor in 1981. He left Berkeley in 1986 to become Director at the Max-Planck Institut füraterrestrische Physik in Munich (FRG) where he is also Honorary Professor at the Ludwig-Maximilian University. In 1999 he came back to UCB as part-time Professor. Awards and Honors include the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max-Planck Society (1979), Presidential Investigator Award (1983), Newton Lacy Pierce Prize of the American Astronomical Society (1986), Leibniz Prize of the German Science Foundation (1990), Foreign Member of the Academie des Sciences (France, 1998), Lyman Spitzer Lecturer (Princeton, 1998), Sackler Lecturer 2000 (Princeton University), Oort Professor 2000 (Leiden University), de Vaucouleurs Medal 2000 (University of Texas, Austin), Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences (2000) and Prix Janssen (2001).