Manuel Castells is a University Professor and the Wallis Annenberg Chair of Communication Technologies and Society at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, as well as an Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Planning at the University of California in Berkeley. He is Director of Research in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge and has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor at M.I.T. and Oxford University. He is the author of 27 books, including The Information Age: Economics, Society, and Culture, which has been translated into 22 languages, as well as Communication Power. He is a member of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the British Academy, Academia Europaea, the Mexican Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Academy of Economic Sciences of Spain. He was a member of the European Research Council's and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology's founding boards. He received the Erasmus Medal in 2011, the Holberg Prize from the Norwegian Parliament in 2012, and the International Balzan Foundation's Balzan Prize in 2013.