Derek Briggs is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin and the University of Cambridge  where he worked on the extraordinary fossils of the Cambrian Burgess Shale of British Columbia.  The Burgess Shale project subsequently became one of the most celebrated endeavors in the field of paleontology in the latter half of the 20th century (see Stephen J. Gould's Wonderful Life, Norton 1989).  Briggs moved from the University of Bristol, UK, where he was Chair of the Department of Earth Sciences from 1997 to 2001, to Yale University at the beginning of 2003.  He is currently Director of the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies, Professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics, and Curator in Charge of Invertebrate Paleontology at the Peabody Museum.  He was President of Palaeontological Association (UK) from 2002-2004 and is President-Elect of the Paleontological Society (US).  He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (the UK national academy of sciences).  Briggs’s research is on the preservation and evolutionary significance of exceptionally preserved fossil biotas.  This involves a range of approaches from experimental work on the factors controlling decay and fossilization, through studies of early diagenetic mineralization and organic preservation, to field work on a range of extraordinary fossil occurrences.  He has published over 200 scientific papers and several books, including The fossils of the Burgess Shale (with D.H. Erwin and F.J. Collier) in 1994 and The fossils of the Hunsrück Slate - marine life in the Devonian (with C. Bartels and G. Brassel) in 1998.  Palaeobiology II, his second synthesis of paleobiology (edited with P.R. Crowther), was published by Blackwell Science in 2001.