Dean Zimmerman grew up in Mankato, Minnesota, where he remained for his undergraduate years at Mankato State University (now Minnesota State University).  He majored in Philosophy, English, and French.  At MSU, he met Tami Wingert, and they were married in the summer between their graduation from MSU and the beginning of Dean’s graduate work at Brown University, where he received a masters and Ph.D. in philosophy.  His dissertation advisor was Roderick Chisholm.  Dean and Tami moved to South Bend, Indiana, where he began teaching at the University of Notre Dame for nine years.  Their three children were born during those years: a girl, a boy, and a girl (Dylan, Dominic, and Analise).  After a brief time at Syracuse University, Dean moved to Rutgers University (along with two metaphysician-friends of his, Ted Sider and John Hawthorne), where he is now an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies. Dean is founding editor of Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, and has co-edited numerous volumes: The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), Metaphysics: The Big Questions (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998; 2nd ed. forthcoming, 2007), Persons: Human and Divine (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 2007) and Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007).  He is the organizer of a summer workshop called “Metaphysical Mayhem” that has convened nine times, and now occurs biennially; and he has put together four other conferences, including three supported by a grant from the Pew Christian Scholars Program.  His publications include over thirty articles in scholarly journals and books, in addition to encyclopedia entries, introductions, book reviews for scholarly journals, and several reviews for The Times Literary Supplement.  He gave the 2004 Dasturzada Dr. Jal Pavry Memorial Lectures in Oxford University, and will give a Jowett lecture at Oxford in Fall, 2006. Dean worked in record stores during his college and post-graduate years; and as a keyboard player in a ’50s and ’60s band, playing the bars, VFW halls, and bowling alleys of Southern Minnesota.  For one shining moment, there was a band called “Spinning Jenny,” consisting of Dean on synthesizer, Tami on bass, two philosophy graduate students from Notre Dame on guitars, and a logician’s teenage nephew on drums.  They wrote songs feverishly, but disbanded when they discovered that the New Wave had been dead for 10 years already.  Unsurprisingly, Dean collects records (vinyl, not the little plastic things).