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

Cris has published over 150 papers at the boundary between physics and computer science, ranging from quantum computing, to phase transitions in NP-complete problems, to the theory of social networks and efficient algorithms for analyzing their structure. 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, Cris is the author of The Nature of Computation from Oxford University Press.