Dr. Peter Westwick is Assistant Research Professor in the History Department at the University of Southern California, and Director of the Aerospace History Project at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. He was previously an Olin Fellow in International Security Studies at Yale University and, from 2000 to 2004, Senior Research Fellow in Humanities at Caltech. He is the author of Into the Black: JPL and the American Space Program, 1976-2004 (Yale University Press, 2006), which won the Gardner-Lasser Aerospace History Literature Award of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literature Award of the American Astronautical Society, and The National Labs: Science in an American System, 1947-1974 (Harvard University Press, 2003), which won the Book Prize of the Forum for the History of Science in America. He is also editor of Blue Sky Metropolis: The Aerospace Century in Southern California (University of California Press, forthcoming 2012). He has published articles in Diplomatic History, Physics Today, Technology and Culture, Minerva, Centaurus, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences. He received his BA in physics and PhD in history from the University of California at Berkeley. He is currently working on a history of the Strategic Defense Initiative, and a history of surfing.