David Chalmers was born in Sydney and grew up there and in Adelaide. He spent most his teenage years as a math geek, while he studied mathematics at the University of Adelaide from 1983 to 1986. After he hitchhiked around Europe, his little obsession with the problem of consciousness spun out of control. This resulted in him moving to the Indiana University in 1989, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1993 in philosophy and cognitive science. He worked in Doug Hofstadter’s extremely stimulating Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition (Chalmers.) After two years in the Midwest as a postdoc at Washington University in St. Louis, he moved to the UC Santa Cruz from 1995-98, then to University of Arizona from 1999-2004, and back home to Australia in 2004. He took up a part-time position at NYU in 2009, and started working full-time in 2014.He is a proud of co-founder of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, the PhilPapers Foundation, and three different Centers for Consciousness. He is proud of his many terrific students and postdocs (Chalmers).When he had the time and ran out of excuses, he would sometimes do some real work. He wrote three books and many articles on consciousness, meaning, metaphysics, and various other topics in philosophy and cognitive science (Horgan, John). Consciousness was his first love, and it’s what he always came back to, but one of the nice things about being a philosopher is that one is allowed to be interested in all sorts of things (Chalmers). He did a lot of fairly technical philosophy, such as philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology. As well as being closely involved with work in science including neuroscience, psychology, AI, and physics (“Interviews”).Over the years his interests got broader and broader to the point where he is now interested in almost every area of philosophy.  That doesn’t mean he does research on them; he doesn’t think he has the expertise to do good work in the history of philosophy, in political philosophy, or in aesthetics, for example, but he goes to the modern philosophy conference at NYU yearly. He goes now and then to the regular colloquium in legal, political, and social philosophy, and takes part in a regular discussion group in the philosophy of music (Horgan, John).His research interests are a little bit more constrained.  Early on David Chalmers was driven by the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, bringing in other areas including metaphysics and the philosophy of language when they were of instrumental value.  Over time those other areas came to seem very interesting, as in turn did questions in epistemology, the philosophy of science, and meta-philosophy.  He spent most the 2000’s trying to work out a coherent picture tying together these areas (“Interviews”).He is now getting especially interested in the philosophy of technology. Over the years he has done plenty of work in this area, e.g. on artificial intelligence, the nature of computation, the extended mind, simulated worlds, and virtual reality.  But he would like to work on these issues more systematically.  One project is to write a book that introduces and addresses many of the great problems of philosophy through the lens of information technology.  His hope is that done properly, the book could simultaneously serve as an introduction to philosophy for a wide audience while also being a substantial work of philosophy in its own right. He can’t picture there ever being intelligent life without philosophy (Horgan, John). David Chalmers major contributions the the philosophical society is his ability the ask the hard questions, the questions that require the most dramatic answers; the questions whose answers will leave you uncomfortable. His theories on the conscious requires an open mind with dramatic thinking. The potential answers will shake the very foundation of science and philosophy. What if consciousness is universal, what if all life has a conscience; how would that change and shape ethical thinking. In my opinion David is pushing the the progress of philosophy way more than the boundaries (“Interviews”).