Leon Balents is Professor of Physics in the Physics Department and a Permanent Member of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is active in theoretical condensed matter physics, where his research interests include quantum magnetism, strongly correlated electrons, low-dimensional systems, and topological phenomena in solids. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University in 1994 and has been on the faculty at UCSB since 1999.