Douglas N. C. Lin is professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was born in New York and grew up in Beijing. He earned his BSc from McGill University, his PhD from the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge University, and performed postdoctoral research at both Harvard and Cambridge. In 1979 he took an Assistant Professorship at UCSC, and has remained there since. He is also the founding director of the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University.