Raymond Arvidson received a Ph.D. from Brown University in 1974. He is presently the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, focusing on teaching and research about current and past environments on the Earth, Mars, and Venus. He is a fellow of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences. He has been instrumental in development and implementation of both orbital and landed missions to the planets, including participation in the Magellan Radar Orbiter Mission to Venus, Team Leader for the Viking Lander Imaging System on Mars, member of the Project Science Group for the Mars Global Surveyor Mission, Deputy Principal Investigator for the highly successful Mars Rover Missions (Spirit and Opportunity), the Robotic Arm Co-Investigator (aka “Dig Czar”) for the Mars Phoenix Lander Mission, and Co-Investigator for the hyperspectral mappers OMEGA (European Mars Express Orbiter) and CRISM (on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter). Currently he is a participating scientist on the Mars Science Laboratory Mission. He is the Director of the NASA Planetary Data System Geosciences Node, making available ~100 terabytes of NASA data to the world-wide research community. He is also Director of the undergraduate Pathfinder Program in Environmental Sustainability (http://wufs.wustl.edu/pathfinder). He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and the American Geophysical Union (AGU), received the AGU Whipple Award, has been honored as the Missouri Teacher of the Year, and is a recipient of three NASA Public Service Medals, and a number of NASA citations and awards from Washington University in Saint Louis.