Michael T. Heath is Professor and Fulton Watson Copp Chair Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he has also served as Director of the Computational Science and Engineering Program (1996-2012), Director of the Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets (1997-2010), and Interim Head of the Department of Computer Science (2007-2009). He received a B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Kentucky, an M.S. in Mathematics from the University of Tennessee, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. Before joining the University of Illinois in 1991, he spent a number of years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, first as Eugene P. Wigner Postdoctoral Fellow and later as Computer Science Group Leader in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division. His research interests are in numerical analysis---particularly numerical linear algebra and optimization---and in parallel computing. He has been an editor of the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, SIAM Review, and the International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, as well as several conference proceedings. He was named an ACM Fellow in 2000, a SIAM Fellow in 2010, and an Associate Fellow of the AIAA in 2010. He was elected a member of the European Academy of Sciences in 2002, and received the Apple Award for Innovation in Science in 2007. His teaching awards at the University of Illinois include the William L. Everitt Award for Teaching Excellence in 1998, the Campus Award for Excellence in Graduate and Professional Teaching in 2002, and the Taylor L. Booth Award from the IEEE Computer Society in 2009.