Stephen Weiner was educated in South Africa (B.Sc., University of Cape Town, 1969), Israel (M.Sc. in geochemistry, Hebrew University, 1972) and the USA (Ph.D. in geo-biology at Cal Tech, 1976). He is the founder and, since 1996, the director of the Kimmel Center for Archaeological Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he is a professor of structural biology. He has been awarded the Samuel Jaroslavsky Prize (1980) and the Ernst D. Bergmann Prize for Chemistry (1984), and is currently a Burch Fellow at the Smithsonian Institute. He is the author of On Biomineralization (Oxford University Press, 1984) and over 150 articles, mainly on mechanisms of biomineralization, structure-mechanical function relations in biological materials and archaeological science.