William C. Schieve is currently Professor Emeritus of Physics at the Center for Complex Quantum Systems at the University of Texas in Austin. He received his undergraduate degree from Reed College in Portland, Oregon and his masters and Ph.D. from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Prof. Schieve is the author of more than 100 articles and has edited five books in the field of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and chaos. His recently completed a new book with his student Matthew Trump called Classical Relativistic Many-Body Dynamics.

In 1986, Prof. Schieve received an A.S.E.E. summer award at N.O.S.C. for work on the non-linear and stochastic dynamics of the superconducting quantum interference device. In 1987, he received the Senior Humboldt Prize and a University Institute Award for a sabbatical leave to the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, Garching. There, Prof. Schieve worked on chaos in the S.Q.U.I.D., particularly the effects of noise both quantum and classical, resulting in a semi-classical perturbation analysis of the mean field description of the laser.

In 1989, he again received the A.S.E.E. award to N.O.S.C. where a series of papers were begun on a new non-linear dynamics model of the Hopfield Neural Network. A seminal result was achieved showing how a large network by means of the "slaving" principle could be viewed as effectively a one or two or few simple neuron dynamical system. He later helped to achieve the simplest example of chaos in such a system.

He has been a Visiting Professor at the Univeristy of Ulm in summer 1996, 1997 and 1999.