Professor Douglas Lin is the founding director of the Kavli Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Peking University. He is also a Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He obtained his B.Sc. from McGill University in 1971, Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 1976. He received his postdoctoral fellowships at Cambridge and Harvard Universities before joining the faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1979. He was awarded the Otto Schmidt Metal, the Churchill overseas, John Simon Guggenheim, Alexander von Humboldt, and Sackler Distinguish fellowships. He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science in 2002. His areas of expertise include theory of star and planet formation, interstellar medium, accretion disks, galactic dynamics, and active galactic nuclei. He has published over 180 research papers in refereed journals. He has served on numerous NASA committees.