R. James Milgram is an emeritus professor of mathematics at Stanford University where he has taught since 1970. He is a member of the National Board for Education Sciences - the presidential board that oversees the Institute for Education Research at the U.S. Department of Education - is also a member of the NASA Advisory Council, and is a member of the Achieve Mathematics Advisory Panel. He was one of the members of the Common Grounds Project that included Deborah Ball, Joan Ferrini-Mundy, J. Kilpatrick, Richard Schaar, and Wilfried Schmid. From 2002 to 2005, Professor Milgram headed a project funded by the U.S. Department of Education that identified and described the key mathematics that K-8 teachers need to know. He also helped to direct a project partially funded by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation that evaluated state mathematics assessments. He is one of the four main authors of the California Mathematics Standards, as well as one of the two main authors of the California Mathematics Framework. He is also one of the main authors of the new Michigan and new Georgia mathematics standards. Among other honors, he has held the Gauss Professorship at the University of Goettingen and the Regent’s Professorship at the University of New Mexico. He has published over 100 research papers in mathematics and four books, as well as serving as an editor of many others. His main area of research is algebraic and geometric topology, and he currently works on questions in robotics and protein folding. He received his undergraduate and master’s degrees in mathematics from the University of Chicago, and his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Minnesota.