Imre Kondor obtained his M.Sc. from Eötvös University (ELTE), Budapest, in 1966, the candidate of physical sciences degree in 1984, and the doctor of physical sciences degree in 1988. From 1966 to 1989 he held various positions in the Research Group for Theoretical Physics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in 1989 he became professor of physics at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Eötvös University, and in 1998 he became head of the Department of the Physics of Complex Systems at the same university. During the same period he had various visiting positions at ICTP, Trieste, Italy (1972-73), Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany (1981), CEN, Saclay, France (1982), Victoria University, Manchester, UK (1984-86). In 1992 he founded the Bolyai College, a school of excellence for science students, where he served as director until 1998. From 1998 he started lecturing also at the Budapest University of Economic Sciences, and from1999 has been head of the Market Risk Research Department of Raiffeisen Bank, Budapest. During the first few years of his research carreer he worked on condensed Bose systems, from the early 70’s on static and dynamic critical phenomena. Around 1980 his research interest turned to random systems, in particular to the replica field theory of short range spin glasses. His present research subject is the application of the methods of statistical physics to problems in quantitative finance.