Michael Crommie received a bachelor's degree in Physics from UCLA in 1984 and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1991. He was a postdoctoral researcher at IBM Almaden for two years before joining the Physics Department at Boston University in 1994. In 1999 Crommie moved to the Physics Department of UC Berkeley, where he remains today (and where he is also a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Faculty Senior Scientist). Crommie's main research interests lie in exploring the local electronic, magnetic, and mechanical properties of atomic and molecular nanostructures at surfaces. He is interested in studying how interactions between atomic-scale structures affect their microscopic behavior, and how quantum mechanical effects influence device behavior in very small structures.