Justin Schwartz received a B.S. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After serving as one of the first Science and Technology Agency of Japan Fellows at the National Research Institute for Metals, he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an assistant professor. In 1993, Schwartz joined the newly formed National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Florida State University, where he served as the leader of the HTS Magnets and Materials Group. In 2003, his research group, in collaboration with Oxford Instruments, established the world record for magnetic field generation by a superconducting material. In 2009, Schwartz joined North Carolina State University as the head of the Department of Materials Science & Engineering and Kobe Steel Distinguished Professor. His research interests include superconducting materials and magnetics, magnetic materials, and multiferroic materials, and the systems they enable. Schwartz has published over 220 peer-reviewed journal articles and has graduated 42 Ph.D. and M.S. students in six academic disciplines, including 15 female and six underrepresented minority students. As department head, he has led the rapid expansion of his department, guiding them upwards in the national rankings. Schwartz was the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity from 2005 to 2012 and is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and ASM International.