Manuel Castells was born in Spain in 1942 and grew up in Valencia and Barcelona. He studied law and economics at the Universities of Barcelona and Paris, receiving doctorates in Sociology and Human Sciences from the University of Paris-Sorbonne. Before his appointment to the City & Regional Planning and Sociology departments at Berkeley, Professor Castells taught sociology at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences at the University of Paris. He has lectured at over 300 academic institutions in 43 countries and has authored 21 books and edited or co-authored 15 additional books, as well as over 100 articles in academic journals. His trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture has been translated into 18 languages. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and has served as an adviser on technology and development to many governments and organizations, including US AID, the European Commission, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program, ILO, and UNESCO. Professor Castells currently serves as the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He is also Research Professor at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona.