Albert Hofmann received his Doctorate in physics from the ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in Zurich, in 1964. From 1966 to 1972 he was a Research Fellow at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator, a joint laboratory of Harvard University and MIT. He then spent the next ten years working as Senior Physicist at CERN, Geneva. In 1983 he became a professor at Stanford University, working on the Stanford Linear Collider (SLC) and on optimising the storage rings SPEAR and PEP for synchrotron radiation use. He spent two years as head of the SLAC beam dynamics group. He then returned to CERN, in 1987, and was jointly responsible for the commissioning of the Large Electron Positron ring LEP. After its completition, he worked on accelerator physics problems with this machine up until his retirement from CERN in 1998. Over the years Professor Hofmann has done consulting work for other machines, such as the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), the Synchrotron Radiation Research Center (SRRC) in Taiwan and the Swiss Light Source (SLS). He has taught in over 25 short-term schools on accelerator physics and synchrotron radiation, and has published numerous papers. In 1992 he was elected to become a Fellow of the American Physical Society, in 1996 he received the Robert Wilson Prize from this Society and in 2001 he obtained the degree Dr. Honoris Causa from the University of Geneva.