William B. Tolman is a distinguished McKnight University and L.I. Smith Professor at the Department of Chemistry and Center for Metals in Biocatalysis at the University of Minnesota. His many awards include an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Award, a Camille & Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, and a National Young Investigator Award from the U.S. National Science Foundation. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a member of the American Chemical Society, the Society for Biological Inorganic Chemistry, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Professor Tolman's research interests focus on synthetic modeling of copper and iron protein active sites and the development of catalytic processes for the preparation of biodegradable polymers from renewable resources.