Richard Durrett received his Ph.D. in Operations Research from Stanford in 1976. He taught at the UCLA math department for nine years and at Cornell for twenty-five before moving to Duke in 2010. He is the author of 8 books and almost 200 journal articles, and has supervised more that 40 Ph.D. students. Most of his current research concerns the applications of probability to biology: ecology, genetics, and most recently cancer.