Renaissance man, or bearded guy with terminal attention deficit disorder and academic tendencies? You decide. Google "Michael Hawley" and at the top of the list you'll see his pages from MIT and Wikipedia.

An educator, inventor, explorer and gifted communicator, Michael is one of the most ardent and innovative pioneers of the digital world. He has given his energies to a number of seminal enterprises in academia and industry: at IRCAM he made early strides in computer music; at Lucasfilm, he was part of the team that lit the way for digital cinema; at NeXT, he created the first generation of digital books and libraries including the complete works of Shakespeare and the first digital edition of Webster's Dictionary; as a young professor at MIT's Media Lab, he founded and led several major research thrusts that creatively stretched digital infrastructures, ranging from toy invention to high-tech expeditions in some of the world's most rarified places.

Michael's first love is music. An accomplished pianist, he won the 2002 Van Cliburn amateur competition and has performed solo recitals and appeared with orchestras in many cities here and abroad. He plays a few special concerts every year but does not record.

He's also a photographer of note and has traveled much in the world's far places. In 2003, he produced a stunning photographic book about the Kingdom of Bhutan; it received a Guinness World Record. These books were published by Friendly Planet, a small nonprofit company he founded.

Michael has served on several corporate boards (e.g., Color Kinetics, Eastman Kodak, Vanguard) and nonprofit ones (recently at Rutgers and Yale), and has played founding and advising roles in big companies, startups and philanthropies. Awards include the Jack Kilby Prize for innovation in science, and the Tetelman Fellowship at Yale. And there's plenty of lint in the resumé: bobsledder and member of the US Luge Assocation; Duncan yo-yo champion. Punt, Pass & Kick trophies. A single-digit Bacon-Erdős number. That sort of thing.

He lives in an old church in Cambridge with a puppy, Tashi (a pretty mastiff from the Himalayas). He is blessed with an adopted daughter, Choki Lhamo (17, from Bhutan) and a devoted partnership with Nina You (from Cambodia).