Michael D. Ward received his undergraduate degree in Chemistry from the William Paterson College of New Jersey in 1977 and his Ph.D. degree at Princeton University in 1981. He was a Welch postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, between 1981 and 1982. He joined the research staff at Standard Oil of Ohio in Cleveland in 1982, and in 1984 he became a member of the research staff at the Dupont Central Research and Development Laboratories in Wilmington, Delaware. Ward joined the faculty of the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota in 1990, where he held a joint appointment in the Department of Chemistry. Ward was named a Distinguished McKnight University Professor in 1999, and he was a founding Director of the University of Minnesota Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) from 1998 – 2005. He moved to New York University in 2006 to create the Molecular Design Institute within the Department of Chemistry. Ward is the founding Director of NSF-supported NYU MRSEC, and served as its Director through 2017. He was appointed as a Silver Professor by NYU in 2008 and Chair of the Department of Chemistry in 2009, serving for six years. Ward also has served as an Editor for the ACS journal Chemistry of Materials from 1998 to 2022. He is a Fellow of the Materials Research Society, the American Chemical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the European Academy of Sciences. He has published more than 250 peer-reviewed manuscripts in highly ranked journals and presented more than 200 invited seminars. His research interests span organic solid-state chemistry, crystal engineering, functional organic materials, crystallization, polymorphism, the role of biominerals in biomedicine and disease, organic epitaxy, and atomic force microscopy.