Manuel Castells is arguably the world’s most important living sociologist, with broad interests in political economy, urban space, and social movements. An interdisciplinary polymath, he is the author of perhaps the most influential sociological text of the last half-century, his Network Society trilogy, which was published during the 1990s and established the baseline understanding of how the internet was changing everything from industrial organization to the social life of cities to our models of political organization. After beginning his career as a professor in France in the 1960s (where he was famously fired from Paris X Nanterre for his involvement in the May 1968 movement), in 1979 he moved to the University of California, Berkeley where he was a professor of sociology, and professor of city and regional planning. In 2003, he joined the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication, as a professor of communication and the first Wallis Annenberg-endowed Chair of Communication and Technology. Castells is a founding member of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, and a senior member of the diplomacy center’s Faculty Advisory Council; and is a member of the Annenberg Research Network on International Communication. Since 2008 he has been a member of the governing board of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology. He is the recipient of numerous awards and accolades, including the 2012 Holberg Prize and the 2013 Balzan Prize for Sociology.