Lawrence Hunter was born in Hollywood, CA, and came of age amid the florishing punk rock scene there in the late '70s. He went to college at Yale University, majoring in psychology, doing radio and organizing political campaigns on the side, graduating in 1982. After spending a year on the Big Island of Hawaii, he went back to Yale for graduate studies in artificial intelligence. He received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1989; his thesis was on a machine learning system for improving performance in the diagnosis of lung tumor pathology, and was advised by Roger Schank. Since then, he has been the director of the Machine Learning Project at the National Library of Medicine, where he has been instrumental in an international effort to bring artificial intelligence methods to bear on problems in molecular biology. His research has focused on multistrategy learning systems for support of scientific discovery; his other research interests include the evolution of cognitive abilities and the social implications of advanced computing. He is married to Kali Tal, a scholar of Viet Nam war literature and American popular culture; for fun, he juggles, cooks, writes for high end audio magazines and is searching for the world's best beach.