Bruce Damer is one of the pioneers of the virtual worlds medium having formed the first organization dedicated to the medium (the Contact Consortium), held the first conferences, and authored some of the first publications (the book Avatars, 1997, and others). Bruce has recently led open source virtual worlds efforts in a number of industries including the space program and NASA. He is also heading up a virtual worlds history project with Stanford University and leading the EvoGrid effort for Biota.org, a virtual worlds grid for artificial life experimentation.