Michael Sipser is the Dean of Science, the Donner Professor of Mathematics and member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1980 and joined the MIT faculty that same year. He was Chairman of Applied Mathematics from 1998 to 2000 and served as Head of the Mathematics Department from 2004 to 2014. He was appointed Dean of Science in 2014. He was a research staff member at IBM Research in 1980, spent the 1985–86 academic year on the faculty of the EECS department at Berkeley and was a Lady Davis Fellow at Hebrew University in 1988. His research areas are in algorithms and complexity theory, specifically efficient error correcting codes, interactive proof systems, randomness, quantum computation, and establishing the inherent computational difficulty of problems. He is the author of the widely used textbook, Introduction to the Theory of Computation (Third Edition, Cengage, 2012). His distinctions include the MIT Graduate Student Council Teaching Award, 1984, 1989, and 1991; the MIT School of Science Student Advising Award, 2003; the UC Berkeley Distinguished Alumni Award, 2015; and the Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellowship, 2016. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.