Stuart L. Shapiro is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a leading scientist in theoretical astrophysics and general relativity and has been awarded numerous prizes and honors for his research and teaching, including Sloan and Guggenheim fellowships, IBM Supercomputing awards, and the Hans A. Bethe Prize of the American Physical Society, where he was elected Fellow. Shapiro has published over 400 research papers and, in addition to his writing with Thomas Baumgarte, he is co-author of the classic text Black Holes, White Dwarfs and Neutron Stars: The Physics of Compact Objects (1983).