Cristopher Moore received his BA in Physics, Mathematics, and Integrated Science from Northwestern University, and his PhD in Physics from Cornell. From 2000 to 2012 he was a professor at the University of New Mexico, with joint appointments in Computer Science and Physics. Since 2012, Moore has been a resident professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He has also held visiting positions at the Niels Bohr Institute, École Normale Superieure, École Polytechnique, Université Paris 7, Northeastern University, the University of Michigan, and Microsoft Research.

Moore has written over 160 papers at the boundary between mathematics, physics, and computer science, ranging from quantum computing, to phase transitions in Bayesian inference and NP-complete problems, to the theory of social networks. He is an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Mathematical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. With Stephan Mertens, he is the author of The Nature of Computation from Oxford University Press.