Damien Challet graduated as a physicist at the Swiss Institute of Technology, Lausanne, and obtained his Ph.D at Fribourg University under the supervision of Prof Yi-Cheng Zhang. He then spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow in Theoretical Physics at Oxford and is now Nomura Junior Research Fellow in Financial Mathematics, Oxford, jointly with Wadham College. He was given the Young European Scientist Award in Socio- and Econophysics in 2002. Matteo Marsili graduated in physics at La Sapienza in Rome. Then he moved to Trieste, obtaining his Ph.D. at SISSA in 1994. Having been a resea...