Christos Papadimitriou studied electrical engineering in Greece, and got his PhD in computer science from Princeton in 1976. He has taught theoretical computer science at Harvard, MIT, Athens Polytechnic, Stanford, UCSD, and UC Berkeley. He joined Columbia in the fall of 2017. He has written research articles on the theory of algorithms and complexity, and its applications to optimization, databases, control, AI, robotics, game theory and economics, biology and evolution. He has also written five textbooks, as well as a collection of essays and three novels. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is the recipient of the Knuth prize, the Gödel prize, the von Neumann medal, and nine honorary doctorates. At Columbia, he holds the Donovan Family Chair.