Eric Allender received a B.A. from the University of Iowa in 1979, majoring in Computer Science and Theater, and a Ph.D. from Georgia Tech in 1985. He has been at Rutgers University since then, serving as department chair from 2006 to 2009. He is a Fellow of the ACM. He is a former Editor-In-Chief of ACM Transactions on Computation Theory, and still serves on the editorial board, as well as on the board of Computability and of The Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science. During the 2009/2010 academic year, he was a Fulbright Fellow in South Africa. His research focuses on computational complexity theory.