David Gross, born 1941 in Washington D.C., concluded his graduate studies in elementary particle physics at the University of California in Berkeley in 1966. He subsequently started his research in the field of the strong interaction, one of the fundamental forces in Physics which holds the positively charged protons in an atomic nucleus together. Professor Gross was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for his discovery that the strong interaction weakens as the subatomic particles move closer, a phenomenon referred to as asymptotic freedom. Since 1996 David Gross is director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara where he participates in the different scientific programs while continuing his research in the field of high energy physics, quantum field theory and string theory.