Benjamin Pierce joined the CIS Department at Penn in 1998. Previously, he was on the faculty at Indiana University and held research fellowships at Cambridge University, the University of Edinburgh, and INRIA-Roquencourt. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in 1991. His research centers on programming languages, static type systems, concurrent and distributed programming, and synchronization technologies. His books include the widely used graduate text Types and Programming Languages. He is also the lead designer of the popular Unison file synchronizer.