Dr. Ian Foster, co-author of "The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure", is an internationally recognized researcher and leader in the area of Grid computing.

Dr. Foster is Associate Director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. The Distributed Systems Lab that he heads at Argonne and Chicago is home to the Globus Toolkit, the open source software that has emerged as the de facto standard for Grid computing in both e-business and e-science.

Foster is a fellow of the British Computer Society. His awards include the British Computer Society's Lovelace Medal and the Global Information Infrastructure (GII) Next Generation award.