Robert Zimmerman obtained a BS and MS in mechanical engineering from Columbia University, and a PhD in solid mechanics from the University of California at Berkeley. He has been a lecturer at UC Berkeley, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Head of the Division of Engineering Geology and Geophysics at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Rock Mechanics and Mining Sciences, and is on the Editorial Boards of Transport in Porous Media and the International Journal of Engineering Science. He is the author of the monograph Compressibility of Sandstones (Elsevier, 1991), and co-author, with JC Jaeger and NGW Cook, of Fundamentals of Rock Mechanics (4th ed., Wiley-Blackwell, 2007).