Aurel Lazar has been a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University since 1988. He is founder and leader of the COMET Group of the Center for Telecommunications Research at Columbia University. He was the chief architect of two experimental networks, generically called MAGNET. This work introduced traffic classes with explicit quality of service constrains to broadband switching and led to the concepts of schedulable, admissible load and contract regions in real-time control of broadband networks. He is currently leading the COMET project on the foundations of the real-time control and management architecture of multimedia networks. His management and control research pioneered the application of virtual reality to the management of ATM-based broadband networks. Lazar is an IEEE Fellow (1993); a member of the editorial board, Journal of Multimedia Tools and Applications, Kluwer; editor of Multimedia Systems, ACM/Spring Verlag; member of the editorial board, Telecommunications Systems, Baltzer; editor, Telecommunication Networks and Computer Systems (Monograph Series), Springer-Verlag, New York.