A former student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, Laurent Manivel received his PhD from the University of Grenoble in 1992. He has been a CNRS researcher at the Institut Fourier in Grenoble since 1989, and is currently a member of the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques in Montréal. He is the recipient of the Jacques Herbrand prize from the French Academy of Sciences. His research interests lie in complex algebraic geometry and representation theory.