William I. Newman is a Professor in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences as well as the Departments of Physics and Astronomy, and Mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he has taught for over 30 years. A unifying feature of his research is the role of chaos and complexity in nature, in applications ranging from geophysics to astrophysics as well as mathematical, statistical and computational modeling in condensed matter physics, climate dynamics and theoretical biology. Professor Newman is a former member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow and has held appointments as the Stanislaw Ulam Distinguished Scholar at the Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratory and as the Morris Belkin Visiting Professor in Computational and Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. For six months he also worked with colleagues in the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow on modeling earthquake events. He has served in an editorial capacity for the Journal of Geophysical Research and Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics and has held elective office as chair of the Division of Dynamical Astronomy of the American Astronomical Society.