Nicholas Negroponte is founder and chairman of the One Laptop per Child nonprofit association. He is on leave from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he served as the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Technology and as director of the MIT Media Lab, which he co-founded.

Negroponte, a pioneer in the field of computer-aided design, earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from MIT, and he has been a member of the school’s faculty since 1966. The Media Lab, which was conceived in 1980, opened its doors in 1985 and has been an incubator for numerous technological innovations. He is also the author of the 1995 best-seller, Being Digital, which has been translated into more than 40 languages.

Negroponte serves on the board of directors for Motorola and as general partner in a venture capital firm specializing in digital technologies for information and entertainment. He has provided start-up funds for more than 40 companies, including Wired magazine.