Gene Stanley’s pathbreaking career in physics and complexity studies began when he performed biological physics research with Max Delbruck and was awarded the Ph.D. in physics by Harvard. Today he works in collaboration with students and colleagues on major puzzles in interdisciplinary science. His main focus is understanding the anomalous behavior of liquid water in bulk, nanoconfined and biological environments. He has worked on a range of other topics in complex systems, such as quantifying correlations among the constituents of the Alzheimer brain and quantifying fluctuations in noncoding and coding DNA sequences as well as interbeat intervals of the healthy and diseased heart. Honored by universities and scientific societies around the world, Stanley is a member of the Academies of Sciences in the U.S. and Brazil. He was elected chair of the 2008 NAS/Keck Futures Initiative on Complexity and is an active member of the NAS committee Forefronts of Science at the Interface of Physical and Life Sciences, charged with finding ways for fostering useful collaborations between physicists and life scientists. He also serves on three NAS committees concerned with threat networks and threatened networks.