Robert W. Herdt is International Professor of Applied Economics and Management, Adjunct, at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. For 17 years he worked at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York as Director of Agriculture and later as Vice President. He joined Cornell as advisor to the Director of Cornell’s International Program in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Applied Economics and Management. Herdt received his undergraduate and Master’s degrees at Cornell and his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, St. Paul. His career has focused on improving the well-being of poor, agriculturally-dependent people in developing countries through increasing the productivity of their farming systems. Before joining the Rockefeller Foundation he worked in agricultural research institutions in India and the Philippines, at the University of Illinois, and the CGIAR Secretariat at the World Bank. His current work on research management, intellectual property rights, and the economics of technological change is designed to foster understanding of the role of new technology as an important force generating agricultural productivity and income gains over the past century.