Benjamin Bederson is Professor of Physics Emeritus at New York University and Editor-Chief Emeritus of the American Physical Society. He received a BS from. CCNY in 1946, an MS from Columbia University in 1948 and a Ph.D. from New York University in 1950. He served in the US Army during WWII from 1942-1946, half of which time was spent as a. "scientist soldier" at Los Alamos. He was a postdoc in J. R. Zacharias' atomic beams laboratory at MIT and returned to NYU in 1953 as a faculty member. At NYU he combined his Los Alamos, MIT and Ph.D. experiences to organize one of the world's first atomic beams laboratories devoted to the study of atomic collisions and structure. He has served as Physics Department Chair, and was for three years Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science. From 1978-1991 he was Editor of Physical Review A, the APS journal devoted to atomic, molecular and optical physics, and from 1992-1997 was Editor-in-Chief of the American Physical Society. He is also co-editor, with Herbert Walther, of the annual series Advances in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics, published by Academic Press.