Geoffrey West was born in England in 1940. He studied mathematics and physics at Cambridge University, U.K., and later at Stanford University in California. He received his doctorate from Stanford in 1966 and became a member of the faculty in 1970. As a theoretical physicist his primary interests have been in elementary particles, their interactions and cosmological implications. He was the founder of the high energy physics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. In 2003 West joined the Santa Fe Institute as a distinguished professor and was elected as its president in 2005. His interest in universal scaling laws led him to the development of quantitative models of organisms based on underlying universal principles. Among his current interests is the extension of these ideas to a quantitative understanding of the structure and dynamics of social organizations, such as cities and corporations, and the relationships between efficiency and innovation.